We were thrilled to finally arrive in DC at the James Creek Marina, where we had reserved a slip for our stay. This turned out to be the first time since Ft Pierce that we were to stay in a proper slip, rather than tie up along a dock, and the slip was a bit of a tight fit as we only had a foot to spare on our beam. There was a bit of wind off our starboard coming into the slip and boats on either side. It took 3 tries to get into the slip. We aborted on Dana's attempt at which point there might have been some raised voices heard aboard the Northfork ("If you don't like how I'm doing it, then you can do it yourself") and Mark found himself taking the helm. Of course, people realized that this was becoming interesting and we started to attract a crowd, which made it somewhat annoying for Mark to abort his second approach. The third try was a charm.

This was a big step for us as we had achieved the first major goal. We had gone from never having skippered a boat, to safely sailing over a month and 1000 nautical miles, including several multi-night legs.

When tying up to the slip, we made the mistake of leaving our fenders too low, so they were soaking in the water. The DC water was not the nicest, and by the time we left DC our fenders had changed color and taken an awful smell. A week later we spent an unpleasant day cleaning the fenders and washing the fender covers.

James Creek Marina was unfortunately not in the nicest area of DC, though it was redeemed somewhat by being sandwiched between Ft McNair and the Coastguard Headquarters, which gave you some sense of security.

We met up with my buddy Jason, who was in DC at the Pentagon, of which during our stay we were happy to get a tour of.

While in DC, we had a problem with the generator, it would die after a few minutes from an "engine fault". Amel had not included the optional temperature gauges on the generators, so we didn't know the cause was overheating. Mark worked through the manuals diagnostic steps until he opened the impeller cover and found that the impeller had disintegrated. The impeller is a rubber wheel-like device that pumps sea-water through the heat exchanger so that the sea water can cool fresh water, which in turn cools the engine. Ed had several spare impellers on board, which Mark was able to replace. He then chased down impeller bits that had flowed through to the heat exchanger and threatened to partially block it.

Mark also spent a day or so on the raw water pump for one of the heads, which wasn't working. When the pump ran, it made an unsatisfactory popping sort of sound instead of the deeper pumping noises. This hadn't been urgent because there are two heads on board, but it did need to be replaced. Mark disassembled the pump, cleaned it, and replaced it but without fixing the problem. Mark also tried swapping the hoses between the two pumps, which allowed him to confirm that the problem was just with the pumps, not something else such as a blockage in a hose. Ed had also provisioned a spare pump, which Mark also tried, again without luck. After consulting Ed via email and finding this problem had occurred before, Mark followed Ed's advice of lowering the pump somewhat and running it which had the effect of getting the pump to prime itself and then run. Ed indicated that when you replace the pump to its position, it kept running, which wasn't Mark's experience. At this point, Mark realized that if it wasn't priming itself, some seals in the pump must not be good and were letting air escape. So he opened the pump again and thoroughly cleaned it and applied silicon lubricant to all the rubber seals. The pump then resumed working. Mark also lubed the spare pump which also must have had the same problem, before re-stowing it.