While we were in Isla, I (Carolynn) did a one day trip to Chichen Itza. I’ll do a separate post on that as well as our trip from Guatemala to Mexico.
We left Isla Mujeres for the Dry Tortugas a couple of weeks ago.
We were having an ok passage, motor-sailing in light winds with a strong current pushing us along. Then at 4am the first night (why do bad things happen in the wee hours?), the engine temperature alarm started screaming. I quickly shut the engine down, which rapidly got Tom up. A quick trouble-shooting showed our alternator had committed suicide, taking all the belts and some other important looking pieces with it. Tom started the sweating/swearing/clanking repair while I tweaked the sails, trying to keep us moving roughly in the right direction and as stable as possible. After a couple of hours, Tom was able to work his “Macgyver” magic and we could restart the motor. There were scary “tinking” noises and we were not making any juice for the batteries, but we were going forward. We went into severe energy saving mode; no radar, internal lights, stopped charging the ipad’s :-0
We pulled into the Dry Tortugas after about 52 hours, for the last 12 hours we had everything on our nose, wind and current, but still a decently fast passage. We decided to anchor in a small bay away from Fort Jefferson to avoid the crowds.
We were the only boat and had lots of room. A few hours later we see a seaplane leaving the fort and taxiing (semi-flying) very fast toward us. He went past our port side (pretty close), stopped and turned around behind us, then took off into the sky past our starboard side.
Now we have been buzzed at anchor by big powerboats, pangas, dingys and lots of jet ski’s, but this was the first time we’ve been buzzed by an airplane! We double checked our charts and this is a designated anchorage so we were legal. The pilot was probably just giving the passengers a close-up view of our beautiful boat
I wish we had the time and inclination to go ashore and explore the fort but we needed to get to civilization and get things fixed. The next morning, since we were still in severe energy saving mode, we pulled the anchor up manually! Thankfully our windlass has a manual function so we can use a winch handle and slowly crank it, no hauling the chain up by hand, but it’s still a lot of work! At the last step, using the “kedging” function, I screwed up! I was turning the anchor at the roller when I accidently hit the mechanical switch. The winch handle spun around and smacked my leg really hard; OUCH!! Nothing broken but that’s the biggest boat bite I have every gotten (the picture doesn’t do it much justice).
Oh well, we pounded into the wind from the Dry Tortugas to Key West and pulled into a marina. A couple of days here is as expensive as a whole month at Mario’s in Guatemala! Over the next week, we ordered some parts and Tom was able to get us back and running, making power underway and no more scary tinking noises! We were in the middle of tourist-ville, lots of fun people watching but pretty noisy. We didn’t really do much except work on the boat, a provision run to Winn Dixie (wow! look at everything available!), and a few walks around the old town.
Once everything was fixed and we had a weather window, we went to Marathon. Tomorrow we’ll do an overnight to Fort Lauderdale.
Cheers,
Carolynn & Tom
