Pay no attention to the bright red light

Wednesday was a day for the books. I’d complain, but what transpired was at least mostly partially my fault.

First, the pooper was full. That in itself is no big deal. Part of the boat life, similar to RV life, is figuring out when and where to dump out the holding tanks. I knew this going in…but I didn’t know I would be spending more time worrying about that than water and power. We get power from the sun, and our watermaker turns seawater into fresh water….but they haven’t invented Vapoorize yet to magically empty our tanks.

Anyway. We had two options: go to sea three miles out (at approx 6 miles an hour), or pop on over to the marina and buy some fuel and pump out. We opted for the marina. Anytime we travel, even a small distance, we need to get the boat ready. That includes securing the dinghy (the small inflatable boat that serves as our “car”) up in its hoist. This we did the night before so we could knock this out first thing in the morning. I also pull the standup paddle boards from the water and lay them across the back of the boat. Remember that, it’s important.

A glorious morning arrives. Nobody is grumpy, and we all slept well. Ok, well it was morning at least. I don’t think we’ve slept well at anchor since the buoy incident. After some coffee, I fire up the engines to warm up. Ginger starts right up. Mary Anne, not so much. Not even a click or a whir to let me know that she’s there. Uh oh. Probably an issue with the battery. I investigate. After checking to make sure a connection didn’t come loose, I pull out my shiny new multimeter to see if Mary Anne’s starting battery has any juice. Nada. Well 300 millivolts (.3 Volts). Supposed to be 12.5 Volts. Not enough to wake up a diesel.

I’d hate to find out later that I was testing it wrong and the battery was fine, so I check Ginger’s batter too for comparison. The paddle boards were on top of Ginger’s access panel, so I push them out of the way. They don’t push easily, so I give them a good shove. They were stuck on something, but moved fine when they got free. Remember that, it’s important.

Ginger measured in at 12.5 Volts, which was exactly as I would expect. Yay! Ginger’s bilge (the area under her) is completely full of oil. Not yay. The oil is clear (not black), so it’s not a leak from the engine, so that’s nice. After some investigation, I figure out that one of the jugs of oil we have for oil changes got pierced by an exposed screw from a poorly installed light. Well, at least it wasn’t an engine problem. I use up about half a dozen oil absorbing mats cleaning up the mess (special rags to use for when your cock ups have EPA consequences), and set the broken jug in a position to deal with later.

Wasn’t I supposed to be looking into a dead battery? Oh yea.

Most boats are rigged up with a switch so you can jump one battery from the other, but our builders must have decided this was an unnecessary luxury, so they skipped that feature. “Hey Meredith, it’s definitely dead, we’re going to need a jump”. She calls SeaTow (second time in a week), and they’ll be here in an hour.

Why is there so much trash floating in the harbor? People are so irresponsible.

Wait. That trash is all in a path leading right from our boat. Suspicious. Oh crap! Literally. The small trash can that we put Zulu’s poo-poo into was what the paddle board was stuck on. When I pushed it hard to move it, I knock the bucket of feces overboard. That included the bucket itself, the trash bag and a couple other horrid plastic bags that various Amazon purchases had come wrapped in.

Ok, EPA related emergency number two for the morning. Not the end of the world. It all seems to be floating, so I’ll just pop in the dinghy and go grab it.

Chit. We put the dinghy up in it’s hoist last night, so I have to bring it down first. But the hoist seems to be broken, and won’t come down. I end up looking like a drunken monkey hanging from the davit (fancy word for dinghy hoist) trying to yank on it to get it free. It won’t give. I start freaking out shouting as I watch the garbage (and the can) slowly float away. After a second look at the hoist, I figure out that the lines are all twisted, and jammed in place because I over tightened last night. More monkey moves get it free, and I grab a boat hook (plastic hook on the end of a pole. very useful) and go trash picking. On one pass, a rather large boat either didn’t see me, or didn’t care, and I narrowly escaped being t-boned.

Back to the boat. I got it all (I think). No EPA today.

SeaTow arrives to jump us. The dude is really nice, and gives us a lot of info. He consoles us after a quick search confirms that the builders did indeed skip installing the super handy “jump Mary Anne from Ginger magic switch”. We hook up the jumper cables from his boat, and immediately start hearing a whirrr sound.

That whirr is the bilge pump in the engine compartment. But the bilge is dry, so why is it running? hmm. I take a quick look, and the float switch (similar to the float in the back of your toilet) is stuck on a piece of it’s own wire. I move the wire, and the whirr stops, and we get the engine started with a jump.

“Well Meredith, remember when the bilge pump light was on for the last 4 days and I investigated and determined that it wasn’t a pump problem, but it was a problem with the light and we could ignore it?”

Note to self. Never, ever, not ever, ignore a bright red warning light on your instrument panel.

The engine bilge runs off the engine battery, and drained that sucker of all its juice by running nonstop for 4 days.

At least we know the cause and we don’t need a new battery!

We’re up and running and head to the fuel dock under the advice of the SeaTow captain to not turn off the engine under any circumstances (in case the battery really is dead).

So, we turn off the engine.

In our defense, it wasn’t our fault. We had too. Despite what the SeaTow guy said, the marina folk insisted that we obey the law (probably the EPA again) and turn off the engines during fueling. I guess that’s reasonable. Besides, Mary Anne has been charging off the alternator for an hour at this point, so she should be fine.

After fuel, we FINALLY get to the business at hand and pump out the holding tanks. After that, we fire up the engines to head back to our ancorage.

C’MON!!!

Mary Anne wouldn’t start. Turns out to be a dead dead battery after all.

All of my experience with our 47 foot long, 24 foot wide boat so far as been with two engines. Two engines are great in close quarters (like the fuel dock of a marina). It’s like a shopping cart. You can push/pull the opposites sides to make it spin on a dime. So, now I get to rack up some hours under one engine. Yay experience!

Lesson 1 when you can’t use your engines to steer anymore: you need speed so that you can steer with the wheel (propulsion and such things). The problem being that there’s a very large shiny new yacht with a very large shiny new pointy anchor dangling right in front of us.

A quick prayer and a massive shove off the dock from the fuel dock helpers (thank you Crandon Park Marina) points us in the right direction long enough for me to gun the engine and get us out of the hairy stuff.

Once anchored (also not easy with one engine), I hop back in the dinghy and then our rental car for a trip to West Marine for a new battery. Might as well throw in a spare bilge pump and float switch too. And a fishing net. And some other odds and ends on my list. I apparently spent enough to get a nice new reusable West Marine shopping bag gratis. Thanks guys.

After all was said and done, this was a good thing. That battery would have died soon without me screwing up with the bilge alarm, and if it died elsewhere it would have been much more expensive to replace. We now make sure the dingy is easy to deploy (not over tightened), and all garbage is secure. I’m installing a bin to catch oil in case another jug gets punctured. We have new spare bilge pumps. We also have a new LED bilge warning light, because I burned the previous one out letting it stay on for so long. All is well.

The biggest lesson here is: don’t ignore warning lights (or any signals). What would have been a really small and easy fix cascaded into a complete comedy of errors.