We made it back here yesterday. We passed this "houseboat" along the way. We remembered this from the way down, it's still there and appears to still be used as a residence, although it's obviously not moved.

We came back to the municipal marina and are about 3 slips from where we were last January. Gary stopped by and we talked for a bit. Bud and I were pretty tired, so that’s all we did. When Gary left we made a simple supper on the boat and went to bed.

This morning we started to tackle the things we need to address. Bud started working on the outboard for the dingy. I started to research insurance companies and marinas. After Bud emptied the carburetor float bowl again the engine ran. We have a device used to feed water from a hose to an outboard cooling system (we’ve kept it for some reason from our first boat, an inboard/outboard). So Bud has been able to run the dinghy engine while it’s clamped to the stern rail of the big boat. He ran it until it warmed up and then changed the oil again (which was foamy). He’s going to run it some more tomorrow and then do another oil change, but it’s running pretty smoothly now.

We were also able to empty our forward holding tank, which didn’t get successfully pumped out using the hand pump overboard when we were crossing from the Bahamas nor when we used the pump out at Port Canaveral. This time we had to open the viewing port of the tank (very stinky) and use a pipe hooked to the marina pump out nozzle run right into the tank. The marina made the pipe because they have run into this problem before. Once the tank was empty, Bud sprayed out the inside with water and I sprayed water down the opening you usually use for pumping out. That may have been the problem as Bud said quite a bit of gunk came out when I did that. Anyway, we hope we have that tank working again. While they had the pump out hose at our boat we pumped the aft tank. Unfortunately for the marina, when the guy went to leave he couldn’t find his new pipe attachment. He had laid it down on the finger dock. The only thing we can think is that the hose knocked it into the water while we were pumping the aft tank.

And Bud drilled a hole for a pin through our new flagstaff. I sanded the flagstaff and applied a first coat of teak oil. After another few coats of teak oil we’ll mount our new flag.

I called a marina in the area that seemed to have good rates. I also have an agent in Jacksonville working on finding reasonable insurance for us (hopefully). Gary came by in the afternoon and we drove over to the marina I called. It seems like a reasonable deal so we signed up for a dock for the week. We’ll be moving the boat over there tomorrow. If the insurance works out we’ll probably change to a monthly rate and that will be our base for the season.

The bad news in all this progress is that I talked to the guy at New Jersey Diesel who was supposed to have parts for our Lehman-Peugeot. He didn’t, but kindly offered to make a few calls to try to see what was out there. He called back about an hour later to advise us to repower with a Yanmar. Parts for our engine just aren’t available anymore. So once we know where we’ll be staying, we’ll be shopping for a yard to install a new engine.

Now that we’re here, I’ll update this blog only every few days or as something changes, just to keep folks up to date on our off season progress.