Our first weekend on the boat...

Finally the day had come we were off to spend our first weekend on the boat. We had the best laid plan, the marina was supposed to be fixing a few of the things identified in the survey & were supposed to put the boat in the water the weekend of May 15th. Our plan was to drive a car full of stuff (bumpers, anchors, clothes, ect) out to the boat in preparation for starting our trip the next weekend (May 24th). We had spent the previous few months reading up on the various safety equipment we would need & started buying basic boat stuff (dock lines, hand held marine radio, charts, etc). It appeared the canal opened in early May and we really wanted to get our boat home so we could spend as much time on it as we could over the summer…

Well as usual the best laid plans went down the drain our intent was to spend the weekend on the boat getting to know it, do some sailing, practice docking and all the other typical new boater stuff. Well this is where our adventure was to start, even though the surveyor had reported no problems with the engine apparently there were some problems…. We needed a new fuel tank and after getting that fixed the next hurdle was getting the engine to turn over. No fear the yard guys were supposedly on it & they had supposedly fixed the other items I had asked them to take care of so it would be “ready” for us when we got there.

Needless to say when we got there we were very excited to see the boat in the water, however, we could smell diesel from the dock and when we got down below it was really strong.. Guess they did not clean up the fuel that leaked out when they put the new fuel tank in? We were tired and decided to live with it until the next day. The next morning we were off to get some dish soap to clean up the mess in the bilge. When I got back imagine my surprise when I opened up the bilge I and noticed a good build up of water & then quickly found out nether of our bilge pumps were working… Well next we started the engine and now that the engine compartment was opened up it appeared the stuffing box was leaking… After making a few attempts at tightening it up it became apparent there were larger issues and the boat would need to be hauled out to have the stuffing box rebuilt… So that meant we were not leaving the dock that weekend and if we were lucky we could get the pumps fixed and spend rest the weekend on the boat without sinking. So after 12hrs, several trips to West Marine & Home Depot, and various other places around town we gave up on fixing the pumps for that night and the boat would need to be pulled. We had figured out the strange wiring set up, had gotten both the pumps up and working on several occasions only to have both pumps fail again or to have another hose break. It was now 9pm it was dark and we were tired. We had spent our first weekend on the boat and accomplished very little. We left a list of additional items for the yard to fix when they hauled the boat and a bit discouraged we spent the night in a hotel before heading home the next morning.