A Day of Adventure!!

As planned, we departed Ft. Pierce at 4:00AM.  We experienced a mild boil  at the inlet entrance, but after that we had perfect calm seas.  It's a little intimidating pulling out into complete darkness and solely relying on your charts and radar for guidance.  To give an example of how dark it is from the pilothouse; you cannot see a person standing directly in front of the windshield, nor the bow of the boat; let alone a buoy, channel marker or another boat

View from the Pilothouse at 4:10AM

As soon as the sun came up, we started dragging out the poles and bait.  At 6:45AM Ryan caught a nice Wahoo.  By 7:50 Jackie had about 40lb tuna; however when I went to grab the gaff it came off the hook (but, I do have witnesses) so it's not a fish story.  Later in the day we caught a nice Spanish Mackerel.  

David does routine engine room checks on the hour; at about 9:30 he noticed that the main engine raw water pump was leaking.  EEK - this means that we are in the Gulf Stream and we have to shut down our only engine and hope that we can fix it.   I located a spare main engine impeller gasket and Captain Dave saved the day!!!   We are fortunate, because in addition to our main engine (if something was to go wrong) we can power the boat with either our 12K or 20K generator, so it's triple redundancy.  However, when running on the auxiliary drive you can only go about 3 knots so it would take a LONG time to cross the stream.

Because we shut down the engine the boat got tossed around pretty bad, this was the trigger needed to start my stomach rolling like the ocean.  So I popped a Dramamine and off to sleep I went!  At about 10:30 Ryan came running in my room screaming "Jackie get up, there are whales swimming near the boat".  Sure enough, there were three large whales about 150 yards from us.  I have no idea what kind they were, but they were very slick and grey.  It was breathtaking; however when they disappeared, so did I - back to bed.   

The forward head got clogged (guest head - hint hint) so that was out of commission and something we were not looking forward to working on when we arrived.   After a four hour nap, I got up and went upstairs to the flybridge to hang with my hubby - It was beautiful!!

The remainder of the trip was calm and relaxing.  We arrived in Great Sale Cay and dropped anchor at 7:00PM, so it was a long 15 hour run.   After we anchored we started to crank the generators to cool the boat down and the 12K wouldn't start.  We were scratching our heads because we've really never had any mechanical problems and this will be the third one today.  So Captain Dave proceeded to check it out and determined that it was a tripped circuit breaker (thank goodness).  However, Ryan's job wasn't so fun - let's just say it involved a shop vac, a 5 gallon bucket and a full head - YUCK.  But whatever he sucked out fixed it, because it's been working perfectly since.

The bad luck with machinery followed, as I was vacuum sealing all the fresh catch of the day the sealer kept going off.  It took me an hour to seal 6 bags of Wahoo and Spanish Mackerel.   

We finished the day with grilled Wahoo and an amazing night on the hook.