The plan was for us to fly to Tampa and spend the next ten days getting Eye Quit ready to sail to Tavernier and then sailing her to this destination; followed by a couple of days relaxing aboard and getting used to using the dinghy to row ashore. Neither of us want to be tied up permanently at the dock; we want to swing to an anchor in the middle of the harbor, much the same way that our friend Bradley has done for the past few years.
We boarded the airplane in Albuquerque on Thursday with a list of things we needed to accomplish with the boat before we left the dock for the trip south and a suitcase full of things we thought we needed to safely accomplish this 150 mile trip south from Apollo Beach to Tavernier. I expected the airport security to laugh at us as we tried to haul this stuff through the metal detectors, but there wasn’t so much as a question about what this odd collection might be for.
My plan was to spend a couple of days getting the boat ready and try to leave the dock behind Benny’s house on Sunday or Monday. Our friend, Bradley, who lives in Tavernier, had spent the past month and a half in Terre Haute, IN caring for his mom, who is adjusting to new surroundings and desperately misses him when he’s gone. Everyone should have a friend like him; one never worries about their back when they have friends like Bradley. As much of a free spirit as he is, he is logical, thoughtful and dependable. He drove to Apollo Springs from Terre Haute and met us at the boat on the Thursday we arrived. The plan was for him to help us get the boat ready and then to sail with us to Tavernier. We were going to rent a car in the Keys, drive him and ourselves back to the Tampa area, for us to fly back to Albuquerque and for him to retrieve his car and get back to the part of the world he likes best…aboard his boat.
The first dilemma to be faced was whether to get the boat to a marina to have the bottom cleaned and repainted or to clean it the best we could beside the dock and then sail to Tavernier, where the cost of having the boat hauled and bottom done is significantly cheaper. Bradley, Lara and I had long conversations about this issue and the decision was to get the bottom cleaned the best we could with mask and fins beside the dock and then get the boat to Tavernier for more extensive work and to give us a chance to make some more money to pay for things. The other part of that equation that took a load off our minds was the conclusion that if we wanted to, we could motor down the Intracoastal Waterway for most of the trip south rather than sail out into the Gulf of Mexico for the trip. All in all I was starting to feel pretty good about the way things were going.
We worked to knock out items on our “to do” list under the watchful eye of Benny and his strenuous physical labor helping us accomplish a couple of things that absolutely needed to get done for safety reasons and which left him bloody as he hung upside down in the engine compartment replacing the stuffing in the packing nut. What the hell did I know about a packing nut. All of my previous sailboats had outboard engines to move them around the harbor. Despite the fact that Benny had our money and we had the title, as long as Eye Quit sat at his dock, she was still his boat and he was gonna do right by her.
By Saturday we were ready for me to get into the water to see if I could get some of the growth off the boat’s bottom and I decided to start with a stout scraper at the boat’s stern at the propeller and prop shaft, the only metal below the water line. Fins, snorkel and mask…it was a holding your breath kind of job. I grabbed the prop and felt the growth on it and slid my hand up the prop shaft to feel the neglect there as well. This wasn’t going to be easy.
There is a locker at the rear of the cockpit which holds some necessities such as life vests, storm anchor, horn (way too rusty to use) and a two-bladed propeller. As I was under the boat, holding onto the propeller using the scraper to try to dislodge growth from prop and shaft, my mind shifted back to why that two-bladed prop was in the locker; Benny told me that he had replaced the original two-bladed prop for a three-bladed one that would move the boat with more ease. Something was wrong. My physical senses were struggling to catch up with my brain. The prop attached to the prop shaft on the boat only had two blades. Not possible, I thought. And, yet, there was the truth. As I felt about, the blades were obviously set at an angle to each other that led me to believe that there HAD been a third blade on this prop. I took another breath at the surface and went back down and felt where the third blade should have been and found the stubble of where the blade had been. Dammit!!! I came back to the surface, climbed back aboard and announced my finding to Bradley and Lara and then walked across the grass toward Benny, who was sitting on his back porch watching our activity to announce my finding to him too. “Not possible” was his response. BUT, it was true.
This boat could obviously not be moved under power missing one blade of its propeller. There would probably be no faster way to destroy the transmission or engine than to try to move using the engine. My mind was already calculating the time this was going to cost us to repair, not to mention the cost in greenbacks. That three-bladed propeller had been on the boat for at least 20 years. I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy to remove and replace.
I like to think that I am pretty calm and level headed when things start to go wrong. My mind swirls with the possibilities of what it takes to come out the other side in good shape. BUT, when things start to go south in multiples, I can get overwhelmed if I’m not careful. All of this was happening while I tried to keep Lara from freaking out or from coming to the conclusion that I had made a horrible mistake suggesting and buying this boat. God, I wanted her to love this boat the way I did. I wanted her to love the idea of living aboard her the way that I did.
Benny mentioned that the guy across the canal from his house was a scuba diver and might be able to help. We talked to him and settled on $100 as the cost of him getting in the water and removing the old prop. He worked hard at it, but our faith in his ability to be successful rapidly evaporated. He managed to get the nuts off the end of the shaft, but the prop would not budge, even when he went to his buddy’s house and got the proper tool. At the end of Saturday our options had dwindled to finding someone whose expertise was removing props like ours while the boat was still in the water (i.e. a professional diver in the marine repair/salvage business) or to have the boat towed to a marina, where the boat could be hauled out of the water and the job done right. Of course, by now the sun is setting on Saturday and finding someone to help on a Sunday, especially in light of the fact that most marinas that we could afford were closed on Sunday and Monday, was looking bleak. I started to question whether we were going to get this project completed in the ten days we had planned. I wondered (to myself) if we weren’t going to have to leave the boat at Benny’s house till we returned in January for a couple of weeks.
Saturday wasn’t through with us however. Now would start the most frightening part of our short-lived adventure. Benny wanted to show Bradley how to change the oil in the diesel engine and we removed the companionway steps and garbage receptacle to expose the engine and allow us access to all the necessary places. In the process of doing that, Benny pointed out something to Bradley toward the back of the engine and as Bradley reached into the engine compartment he bumped the hose (like a radiator hose) that connected the galley sink to the through hull fitting that takes ice box melt and galley liquid to the sea. The bump knocked the rusted fitting that connects the hose and the sink off the bottom of the sink and below the waterline. Needless to say, early physics lessons tell you that when the end of the hose is below the waterline, water is going to come rushing in, which it did.
Why the ferrous metal fittings that hold the hose to the bottom of the sink were there was obvious. The boat had been built before plastic became the salvation of the plumbing industry. We quickly raised the top end of the hose above the waterline and the gushing of the water subsided, but water was still coming into the boat. The flashlight showed us the problem; there was a split in the hose at the bottom of the hose about ½” long right where the bottom of the hose joined the brass through hull fitting. Damn. There was by now plenty of water in the bilge and yet the bilge pump had not come on. Benny was there with us on the boat and he was the calmest person on the boat. I don’t know what was going through Lara’s head, but I know what I was thinking. “This damned boat is going to sink, right here at Benny’s dock”. I could not get that thought out of my head.
Testing the bilge pump was one of the items on our to do list, but we hadn’t progressed that far yet. Benny reached down into the bilge and pulled up on the float, thinking that perhaps it was just stuck, but NOTHING! Water continued to fill the bilge. Following the electrical connections, Benny and Bradley found that the power line to the bilge pump was split in two. I will save you the angst that followed as Bradley and Benny tried to connect the two ends of the wires in a waterproof way with problems preventing their success. The fittings that Benny had aboard were too large for the wires leading to the bilge pump and wouldn’t hold. I grabbed an electrical connector out of a drawer aboard and “yelled fuck it…use this damned thing before we sink!” They did and we wrapped it with lots of electrical tape and reached down into the bilge again.
I need to say something about Lara at this point. She knew we were in trouble but set about trying to be productive in the only way she knew how. Earlier in the day Benny had showed her how to install the handle for the auxiliary bilge pump and how to use the hand pump. She crawled out the companionway entrance over the three of us trying to solve the problem and took up a station in the cockpit with one hand on the handle to the auxiliary bilge pump….waiting for orders or waiting for the level of angst to rise to the point where she could not take it any more. Bless her!!!
After installing the traditional twist on electrical connector Bradley reached down into the bilge to pull up on the float to see if things were going to work. In a bit of levity (the ONLY levity in the past several hours) Bradley dropped his new, waterproof to 30’, cell phone into the bilge, where it shone as a beacon from 3’ down. Finally some laughter, as he reached down to retrieve that phone with its spotlight that he was so proud of. Pulling up on the float, the bilge pump kicked into action and we could hear the water being expelled out the stern of the boat. I wondered if the audible sigh was mine, but I think it was Lara’s. Our baby was going to survive. The pump ran for about 20 minutes before the bilge was emptied. The water had been mere inches below the cabin sole when the pump solved the problem.
Now, we had to solve the problem of the split in the hose at the through hull fitting. I had tried to use my hand to close the valve of the through hull fitting to no avail. I was going to have to work on that later. We used about a half roll of duct tape to slow the flow of water into the boat to a trickle and tied up the top end of the hose above the waterline and decided to get some sleep. Both Bradley and I slept in the main salon and listened all night as the bilge pump would kick on about every minute and a half and run for about five seconds. It was at least manageable. I don’t think I slept much.
As I lay there listening to the bilge pump kick on and off, I knew that I was going to have to get the valve on that through hull fitting into the “off” position. I hesitated to use a big metal tool to accomplish that because I knew that it had been a long time since anyone had opened and close ANY of the through hull fittings and didn’t want to break off the handle and create more of a problem for myself. Naïve? What the hell was I thinking when we flew off on this adventure. I knew NOTHING about what it was going to take to keep this beauty afloat. What a knucklehead I am sometimes. You learn quickly, however, when faced with this kind of adversity. The traditional definition of a boat being “a hole in the water, surrounded by wood (in the old days), into which you pour money” went through my head a million times. I was afraid that our money was going to sit there on the bottom in front of Benny’s house or be scattered all over Tampa Bay before we were done.
While no one was looking on Sunday morning, I took a pipe wrench and fastened it over the handle on the valve of the through hull fitting and moved the handle a fraction of an inch. Then, I reached in with my hand and twisted with all my might and got the handle to move to the off position in fractions. Finally, it was fully closed and the water stopped flowing into the boat. Thank God! I hadn’t asked God for this success, but thanked him for it this Sunday morning. I wasn’t going to be able to sleep again till I was sure that water wasn’t going to fill us up. I proudly announced my success to Lara and Bradley and got a big collective sigh.
The sun rose on Sunday to much indecision. What the hell were we going to do? We tried making phone calls to see if we could get answers, but, what the hell, it was Sunday. We worked on some more of our to do list and were feeling good about that when Bradley got a call from the nursing home where his mom was living that things were not going well with his mom in the past 24 hours. Gradually the decision was made on Sunday that we were going to have to go to Tavernier on Monday so that Bradley could take care of some personal things and to VOTE early – since the following day way was election day, November 4, 2008, the day when hopefully we were going to rid ourselves as Americans of the buffoon who had been in charge of things for the past eight years and his political party.
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