This morning we raised the main just to check out our rigging on it and to make sure it hadn’t molded from being wet and inside the sail bag for all these weeks. It was fine. And when we dropped it, it dropped all the way down, for once.

With that encouragement, we went for another sea trial. We had the fuel line Bud had bought plumbed from the tank directly to the Racor filter, skipping the suspect fuel manifold. We headed out through the marina at idle speed. No bubbles. We turned into the channel and Bud opened the engine up and there were the bubbles! We started to talk about our options. Bud suggested we try running it off the jug of diesel we had. I said that was just like the test John had done, and it hadn’t bubbled. Bud said, “Do you want to get Pete to help us?” Yes, I did. Pete’s boat is in the picture. That’s not Pete at the helm it’s a mannequin. It’s a good advertisement. The t-shirt has the name of his business, “Scrubbing Bubbles” and his phone number. He’s the diver I called when we needed the zincs on the shaft moved. He had told Bud that he also did boat work, would charge us about half what Ace would, and was insured.

We took Earendil back to her mooring ball and took the dinghy into shore to look for Pete. We didn’t see him right then, so Bud decided to walk to the bait store while I waited. I called and Pete answered. As I was talking to him I saw him walking towards me along the center dock. Anyway, when Bud finally got back from the bait store, Pete, his friend Don, Bud, Fuzzy and I rode our dinghy back to the boat. The first thing they did was to decide the thread compound we’d used wasn’t working. They took out the fixtures and reset them with Teflon tape and Permatex. We ran the engine and saw no bubbles. I explained that the bubbles didn’t really show up until we ran the engine under load. Pete said the RPM was really the only thing that mattered, but since it wasn’t great for the engine to run long in neutral at high RPM we decided to take the boat out again for a test run. It bubbled. Pete and Don then decided they should bring a pump Don had aboard so we could test the tank pick up separately from the filter and its fittings. We stopped a few minutes at the fuel dock while Pete and Don got the pump and some other tools.

When we got back to our mooring ball there was another boat on it. So we rafted with them. No one was on the boat when we got there, so we boarded it and were running our lines across when the owners showed up. We asked them if they expected to be rafted and they said no, so evidently the marina saw us going out and thought we were leaving. It’s hard to get your line through the mooring ball when you’re the second boat to tie up. We were struggling to get the ball close enough to get our line through when a man in a nearby boat noticed. He got in his dinghy and came over to help. We were grateful, and doubly so as he fell in the water getting back in his own boat!

Back to the bubbles. Pete and Don hooked lines from the pump to the feed and return fittings on our port tank. We turned on the pump and fuel flowed from the tank, through the pump and back to the tank. After clearing air from the lines we continued to see bubbles. They checked our return port and found that it did not have a tube to the bottom, but it did have a tube about half way into the tank. Since the tank was full that tube was long enough to serve as a pick-up, so they switched the lines and tried again using the tube in the return port as the pick-up. Now, once the air from the lines cleared out, there were no bubbles. So we have to be getting air into the pick-up tube. (I’m not sure that’s the only place we’re getting air, but it might be.)

Anyway, on Monday Pete is going to repair our tanks and maybe the bubbles will be conquered! At least we have someone else working and thinking about this. And for tomorrow, we can forget about boat troubles and enjoy Christmas.