Back in Florida

When we last bothered our readers, Temptation was in Jacksonville, Florida, at one of our favorite marinas.  We left her there for the holidays and while we were gone I had a local mechanic repair some plumbing / electrical problems.

When we returned to JAX, we hung around for about 10 days and got together with some boating friends from the area.  We decided our ultimate destination this winter would be Ft. Pierce.  To save you the trouble of looking it up on Google Earth, Ft. Pierce is south of Cape Canaveral and north of Palm Beach.  

On our departure day, we had trouble starting the boat's engines.  I followed Bobby's advice (from King of the Hill) and "jiggled the handle" which got the engines started.  We headed down the St, Johns river toward the Intra Coastal Waterway (ICW) and anchored for the night in a cut off the river.  The next morning...the damn engines wouldn't start again.

No amount of handle jiggling would get them going so we called Sea Tow.  The organization's name is self explanatory.  While they were en route, a final round of jiggling was successful and we waved them off.  At this point, we are seriously concerned about this problem and vowed no more anchoring until we got it resolved.

So on to St. Augustine, one of our favorite stops, where we had a diesel engine expert come look things over.  When he was there the engines started right up.  Dang!  We tried to take off the next day and the problem resurfaced?  Another round of jiggling got us going so at that point we decided to move to the Palm Coast Marina and get this figured out.  To save you the trouble of looking up Palm Coast on Google Earth, it is south of St. Augustine and north of Daytona.

If you've never been to St. Augustine it's worth the time.  It's the oldest city in the U.S. and has lots of historical sites.  Their cross is the tallest in the world at 208 feet.

The diesel expert met us at Palm Coast and, thankfully, the engines would not start.  After some extensive diagnosis (which violated the "think horses not zebras" principle) we found the problem.  The fix included buying new batteries (~ 400 pounds and ~ 2 BOAT units) which had to be shipped from California (read one week).

At this point, we had been in Palm Coast for 10 days.  It's a common feature of marina pricing that the daily rate for 10 days is the same as the monthly rate.  So we decided to stay for a month and then head to Ft. Pierce.  Below is a picture of Temptation at the marina.  We don't have any other pics because we haven't been many places very interesting yet.

Once we get underway, we hope to have more interesting reports.