Re: Boating the Upper Chesapeake
Alright, here is the long awaited update! It's been a crazy week so I apologize for keeping you guys in suspense!!
Well, it all started off on Thursday morning. To start off the story, you need to know one detail, my wife is in a Grand Jury every Thursday in Philadelphia and she commutes there by train. So around mid morning, I sent her a text that said, do not get the train home, instead, meet me at 30th street station. She was very confused and didn't understand what was going on, but finally went along with it. She knew that we were going away for the day, but didn't know where or when. So then I caught the train to Philadelphia and met her at the station. Needless to say she was very confused and asked all kinds of questions. She wanted to know where we were going and when we would be back. I didn't tell her much, just that we were catching a bus to the next destination. Grabbed a cab to the bus station and killed an hour until departure.
Bus ride went well, but seemed to take forever. During the ride, she figured out that we were headed to a Wildwood NJ, pretty easy to do as the tickets had the destination on them. The whole time she was trying to figure out where we were going to stay. It was bugging her like crazy. Finally she figured out that we were going to stay on a boat. (I made a comment that we weren't spending any money on lodging) luckily she assumed that we were staying one of my "Internet friends" boats.
So we pulled into the wildwood bus station and walked about 1/2 a mile to the marina. It was dark so she didn't really get to see the boat when we got to it. Once she saw me step onto it, she immediately knew it wasn't someone else's boat. She was very shocked and not the happiest at first. It took her quite awhile to take it all in. We talked about the whole purchase, when it happened, etc. she wanted to know all of the details. Finally we headed to bed, she still wasn't sure what to think.
We awoke in the morning to fog thicker than pea soup. Visibility less than 1/4 mile. So we walked into town and had breakfast. Fog finally started clearing around 10 am se we untied the lines and casted off. Here is a picture of the marina as we left. I was anxious to leave as this place is really falling apart.
As we were heading out, we snapped a few of these pictures. My wife made sure to point this boat out to me.
As we idled along in the back bays and channels, we were listening to the radio reports of how the fog was out in the bay. It didn't sound to bad, so we kept going. We stopped at Utsch's Marina an topped off the fuel tanks just to make sure that would have plenty.
Went through the canal passing the Cape May and Lewes Ferry docks where we snapped these photos. These boats made me feel so small!
Old railroad swinging bridge in the Cape May Canal
After we turned the corner and past the jetty into the Delaware bay, I eased the throttles forward and she climbed up on plane..... For about 30 seconds. All of the sudden, the port motor started surging and she wouldn't stay on plane. I couldn't understand why as she was running perfect the weekend before! Changed the fuel filter and examined the contents. Looked like there was some water in the filter so I thought that was the problem, tried again and had the same outcome. For the next 45 minutes, I kept fiddling with the fuel lines and changing filters, but I couldn't get it to run for longer than about 2 minutes before it would start sputtering again. During this time, we were continuing ahead on the 1 motor at about 5 mph. I knew it would take 20 hours for the trip at that rate. There was no way that I had the time for that this weekend. First off, the weather forecast for Saturday didn't look that great and I wasn't about to spend the night on anchor in the middle of the Delaware Bay. It wasn't easy, but I had to make a decision, if I didn't have it running well by 12pm, I would turn back. So I went to the bridge and continued on with the one engine as I contemplated the next step of troubleshooting the port engine. My wife went down below and laid down in the front berth for a few minutes. This was not going well, the engine wouldn't run and my wife was getting annoyed and couldn't believe that I bought a boat that wouldn't go above 5 mph. Every second that dragged on, I felt like I would be turning around and heading back to the marina and probably never have my wife step on board the boat again. This wasn't going at all like I had planned and worked so hard to make happen.
To be continued...
