Sitting in a marina is not the “fun” you might get from videos and stories others tell. It’s usually hot, stinky, and filled with people. Even during a pandemic. As we sat in the marina at Cape Canaveral we started a search for a vendor to clean our fuel tanks. This is a pretty common practice for small to large boats. Numerous celebrity boats from Sailing Doodles to Calico Skies have had this issue with gunk in the tanks. I got on the Internet and started calling with zero luck. Our boat even though pretty large was a small job they would want to wedge into their schedule weeks out. If they were willing to take the job.
Getting a vendor to show up was going to be problematic. I spent quite a bit of time doing my day job and sneaking in time to call more and more vendors working my way north and south on the I95 corridor. Filling up a Microsoft OneNote sheet with names and then striking them out. I put out requests for information to various Facebook groups. When a vendor turned me down I patiently asked if they had any suggestions on who could do the job. I got the same suggestion a few times but nobody answered the phone.
There was a guy that used to do the job located their just two minutes from our resting place that numerous people suggested. I spent some time on the phone with him but he’d sold all his gear and was sitting at home during the pandemic retired. He also suggested call this one guy. Searching by keyword on Google only gets a particular type or result. Ozzie Fernandez was listed under “First Class Injectors” as he’s a diesel mechanic that does fuel polishing as a sideline. I finally got him on the phone the next day. The conversation went something like this.
“Hi Ozzie this is Sam on SV Eoti we’re stuck in Cape Canaveral need a tank polished”
“Sorry Sam, I’m booked solid weeks out.”
“Well Ozzie how much would you charge normally?”
“Sam, I’d charge about this much <redacted> to do a tank your size.”
“You know Ozzie I’m stuck; marina fees are high; I’d double that and give you a handsome tip too.”
“What time will you be on the boat tomorrow Sam?”
“We live here Ozzie we are always here.”
“See you in the morning.”
I headed off to Harbor Freight and bought a few things. I bought a small air compressor. I would be stumbling over this for the rest of the trip. I then also bought a series of three way valves. I would later construct a “blow through” system for high pressure air if we saw high vacuum on the system ever again. Though not perfect I could deploy the air compressor later in a few minutes with minimal issue and clean the lines externally. That though happened later.
Ozzie good to his word showed up the next morning. We had pulled the galley of Eoti apart, removing the trim around microwave, removing the Microwave, and the shelf it sat on. The first time we did this took two hours. Spoiler alert. We got good enough at doing this that we could do in 15 minutes. Ozzie had a wonderful contraption of huge pumps, cables, cords, hoses, and giant filters. He made it all look easy. They pulled an extensive amount of stuff from the tank.
We had been using a biocide since we bought the boat. However, niggling reminders would surface. When we changed the Vetus fuel filters to Parker/Racor we found quite a bit of sludge in the Vetus. It looks like we errantly thought we’d gotten it all on the first go-around.
Ozzie would make his money that day. He was pulling pounds of stuff out of the tank. We watched as sludge goo went through the hose consistently for about 15 minutes. There was an 18-inch-long sock filter in the system, and it quickly filled. We easily figured three or four pounds of diesel bug if not a lot more. After about two hours Ozzie finished and we had quite different looking fuel samples. I happily paid him and he said if I had any issues he would come back and do it again. Ozzie is a stand-up guy and stands behind his work.
We ran the engine for just over two hours under static load (in gear) tugging at our dock lines. The engine was ticking over like the beautiful Yanmar it is and we settled with the Marina for a morning departure. We spent time answering work questions and doing some meetings that day while provisioning via Instacart. Things were looking up.
I’m a belt, suspenders, and nail gun kind of guy when it comes to keeping my trousers up. I apply that same kind of thinking to protecting my home, my largest liability, and favorite past time. Ruthful, but honest to a fault I do the same things in my work and life. Something worth being done is worth being done right. 6.5 knots were what we were doing as we exited the harbor there at Cape Canaveral. June 19th found us leaving from Cape Canaveral with smiles on our faces. We made it out the channel and were halfway to the sea buoy when the engine sputtered and died.
My excellent sons and crew jumped to task. We’d just started eating breakfast when this happened. They reported that the vacuum gauge on the Racor was showing maxed out. No need to diagnose, we had a blocked fuel line again. I got on the radio and called the Coast Guard. We were in a busy traffic lane. At the same time, I feathered the prop. We’d coast for quite a while under inertia. Phone in one hand, radio in the other hand, and pointing the boat with the current (going out) with the other hand. Whoops. I called in our position, got TowBoat US on the radio, and had my sons get ready to deploy the anchor as we were on a lee shore.
We waited about thirty minutes. Coast Guard checked in on us a few times and kept in contact with the tow operator. There were few ships coming down the channel, but most were an hour or more out still. The tow operator snagged us, and I turned the boat over to one of my sons. I then started calling Ozzie. Ozzie answered the call on the first ring.
“Ozzie we were trying to leave but we still got bug.”
“You sure? The tanks looked really clean.”
“High vacuum, no engine go zip zip.”
“Yeah sounds like bug. I can’t come today or tomorrow but how about in three days.”
“ASAP Ozzie?”
“No problem, no charge, get it ready and I’ll call as soon as I can get there.”
We were so close. My confidence was really shaken. I was very upset. My family and home had been put on a lee shore with no engine (and in the newest case no wind) twice. We headed back to the marina and got a new slip. The tow operator got us in ever so gentle. I was depressed. I was upset. I felt helpless. I’ve been operating boats of different sizes my entire life. I have more than 5 years of underway time during my lifetime. For a non-professional mariner that is a lot of time. I admit most of that is something called gunkholing.
Gunkholing – Pick up the anchor, go to the next tiny harbor. Put down anchor. Drink beer. Repeat daily.
At 7am the next day Ozzie calls. I was doing work emails in the cockpit (best office in the world) and chatting with my team. Ozzie was inbound and would be their ASAP. My sons, Simon and Stuart, helped me rip apart the galley and get to the top of the tank. We had blown the debris with our air compressor set up back out of the line, but Ozzie would do a full fuel polishing again. He and his helper arrived and a few hours later had pulled a partial sock of stuff back out of the tank. The issue, we surmised, is even though they scrubbed the tank hard (as in pressure washed it with fuel) the scaled growth is sticky. Now with the hyper reactive biocide, the movement of the boat going out the channel, and then general poor state it was in when we started. It just sloughed off.
Ozzie said no charge and was quite embarrassed. Professionals don’t like to do re-work. Get in. Get it done. Get paid. Celebrate the wins. The issue though is that stuff and diesel bug happen. I looked in the tank and it looked just as clean and shiny as it did last time. I thanked Ozzie, and against his protestations gave him what he’d normally charge. He’d shown up when others wouldn’t. He would continue to text me for a couple of months making sure we were doing ok.
I was still upset and scared. I had to relax and lose the jitters. I am always quite aware the sea doesn’t give a shit about me. The sea is a caustic nasty dangerous place slowly eating the guts out of my boat. I had to get right in my head. Then the next day we were leaving Cape Canaveral again and I pointed us north. There is always going to be some timidity when you put a lot of distance under your keel, the sight of land becomes a squint then a blur and then fades to an azure sea on the horizon.
Working in the cockpit on some stuff for my boss I was mildly distracted. Some people worry about their kids’ sports teams. Some people worry about bills. Some people have medical issues (woe to me that one weighs on my mind). I was feeling like maybe I’m not nearly skilled enough. Maybe I’m just not good enough to do this lifestyle. I admit to a sense of timidity that was rocking my world. It was time to acknowledge a few things.
I know I’m getting older, but I don’t feel older. I’m not nearly as fat, old, or geriatric as I act. I am active and in a world-wide pandemic I’m at sea sailing and living a pretty good life. There is still a lot of fear about getting sick. The boat is worrying me more. I had to change my goals and get my mind right. It was time. Talking with the family I said we need to make progress north. We need to be moving but we needed to take our time. Instead of planning big passages we needed shorter passages. We would stop almost every day and get a good nights sleep.
Our goal “Not so far, not so fast, ever forward, be the turtle”
We set up our watch schedule (I’m always on watch even when I’m asleep). My sons like to change things up. Sometimes they do a watch of odds, and other time it is evens (hours). That’s their choice as well as who goes first. After a bit I settled back to do some work, get my mind around some problems at work. We were heading north, and the boat was moving through the water. We had the coast off our port beam and the Atlantic off the starboard. We were heading north and would skip through some anchorages and marinas for quite some time.