It's been a few days since my last post, so I apologize in advance for being vague and brief in my summary of the trip thus far. Things have been going well! We have cranked up our daily mileage goal in an attempt to get to Savannah with some time to explore. Our stop in Baltimore put us a little behind schedule, but seeing friends and family makes t all worth it. Plus, we had a laundry list of work projects on the boat, most of which were checked off. We showered, ate crabs up to our eyeballs, and restocked necessary grocery items. We were able to do the Chesapeake Bay in two days, and today we entered the ICW which is an inside passage taking us down the inside of the Outer Banks, but skipping Cape Hatteras which is known to be particularly nasty this time of year. We intend on sailing all night to make Ocracoke tomorrow morning at the bottom of the Banks. There, we hope to find a hardware store to pick up some necessary items we need to fix our engine.
Now the juicy stuff...
Yesterday (or was it two days ago??) the engine coolant did something bad. We thought we burst a hose, but that was quickly ruled out. All we knew was that there was boiling coolant pouring all over the engine and onto the sole boards. Our only real concern, confident that Yuri could fix the problem, was the Lucky our cat would lick up some of the sweet smelling, but fatally toxic, liquid. On our hands and knees, Paula and I scrubbed the floor, the walls, and any other surface we felt it had come into contact with. Problem fixed, we continued motoring along only to find less than ten minutes later, coolant pouring out on to the sole boards again. Upon investigation, Yuri discovered he had let the cap off the overflow tank. Obviously, I felt frustration at having just scrubbed everything clean only to be voided by such a stupid mistake, but he quickly said he would clean it up himself. Under my breath I mumbled something about how he was right...
Since then, we have had a string of engine problems, the latest of which involves some water hose and a coupling (again I could be making these things up..?) needing to be replaced. In the meantime, the engine is leaking water which is producing steam and has fogged up all our indicator lights. Oh, the first thing with the coolant caused the engine to overheat....badly. Now I remember, it was a belt! We blew a belt and the engine overheated causing the coolant to overheat and boil out. Anyway, that's fixed but now we have this new problem which is less scary because it involves fresh water but Yuri says we can't go out into the ocean unless it's fixed. Fair enough.
Oh and we have run aground twice for stupid reasons. Neither of which I was behind the wheel for. But I'm not blaming anyone...in any case, equipment failure and lack of proper aleep, as well as confined quarters has us all on a bit of an edge. Hoping things will mellow out as we will be visiting the beach tomorrow!
