We left Miami Marine Stadium and headed out Government Cut to the North Atlantic. We got to Boca Raton when the engine sputtered. Joe did his usual underway Racor filter changes with little effect except a continually sputtering engine...must be an almost empty fuel tank! Switching fuel tanks only made the matter worse and...uh oh...the water alarm indicating water in the fuel started to sound just before the engine decided its tolerance limits were exceeded and it stopped.
We drifted for a while as Joe poured the 10 gallons of fuel in the on-deck containers into the starboard fuel tank, drained the Racor filter bowls to get rid of the water that was already in the fuel lines and started the engine again. By this time the dive boat we were drifting toward was becoming very nervous...although the safety people on deck didn't recall their divers!
Anyway we made it to the Lake Worth Anchorage where we assessed the problem and made plans to take a slip in the New Port Cove Marina in the morning to figure out how to get the water out of our infected fuel tank.
We decided to do it right and let the professionals handle it. We contacted Marine Environmental Services (http://cleanmytank.com/) and made arrangements with John Cafiero to come to the Marina to assess and remediate the damage. John arrived precisely as promised at 11:00 AM...always a good sign...and went right to work. Within an hour we had clean empty but clean fuel tanks. Since he was already set up to do the work, we had John clean and suck the accumulation of stuff from our bilge and after a short time, we also had a clean bilge.
We had at least two inches of water and the attendant dead bug bodies in each tank and when John was finished we had two empty but clean fuel tanks. So Joe took the aforementioned two 5-gallon diesel containers and trucked them back and forth from the diesel fuel pump to the boat and filled the starboard tank with 65 gallons of fuel at $3.95 per gallon...a new high!
This took most of the afternoon due to the lack of accessibility of the diesel fuel pump. The main reason for the inaccessibility is this marina caters to dry stored boats which are stacked four levels high in two big storage locations. The fuel dock is located at the end of a 200 foot thoroughfare that is only about 75 feet wide...more than enough room the small power boats to fuel up, turn around and leave the fuel dock. On one side of the thoroghfare were some of the small power boats. On the other side were two $4,500,000 yachts...you did read that right and the number of zeros is correct...and there was no room for us to turn around once we got to the fuel pumps. We were really concerned that bumping up against these expensive boats might damage our boat so, Joe trucked the fuel 10 gallons at a time.
We decided to spend a second night at the marina and leave early the next morning to head to Fort Pierce. The wind was favorable for sailing and the wave height was predicted to be less than two feet, so we prepared Windreka for an early departure, showered, watched a movie...Spiderman 2...and turned in.
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