Key West Lowlights

Way back in July, I had intended to follow the Key West Highlights with a post of lowlights. It turns out that even though it often makes for a better story, it's not so fun typing out your fuckups.

For my Euro-friends, you will notice that the diesel in the left filter is pink. They do that to show that road taxes haven't been paid on this fuel. If they catch you with this on the highway, there's hell to pay.

The clear liquid in the other filter is just gross water that came up into the filters from the fuel tank. There's a little valve that I can turn on the bottom of the filter to allow the water to drip out. It's fine when it's just a drip. But if I turn it too far, the water pours out faster than fuel comes in to replace it, and then there's no fuel flowing to the engine.

I did exactly that in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico on the way to Key West this Summer. And then later, I did it again on the fail over filter. I really was dealing with a lot of dirty water in the fuel tank.

But no problem. There are two more filters right there for the generator. I swapped out one of the engine filters with one of the generators, bled the air out of the line, and we were underway again.

Fast forward a few days. Running the air conditioning in a Key West marina pulls more power out of the battery than the shore power and chargers can put in through much of the day. The battery bank was a bit low, so I started the generator, put the dogs on leashes, and went out for breakfast.

Guess what I didn't do? Tighten the valve back up on the filter I had swapped out there in the Gulf. By the time I got back, I had probably 150 liters of deisel flooding my technical rooms. This was a fiasco.

Jake, V, and I went over to West Marine, bought a tiny bilge pump and a long bit of tubing. Within a couple of hourse, we had managed to get most of it back into the fuel tank. I spent the rest of the day doing my best to clean up deisel that had soaked into almost everything. As late as a couple of weeks ago, we were still cleaning some lines and our storm jib. I have shorts that I can still smell the deisel in, even all of these weeks later.

A dick across the dock got pissed about the bit of deisel that was inevitably floating in the water by our slips. A dock hand came down, and I started explaining how the power coming from the post wasn't enough to keep my air conditioning running and the batteries topped off. He started jiggling the power cord on the post, and he fried both the cord and the boat plug, fusing them together forever.

Mrs. theskinnyonbenny marched down to the office, and gave the dockmater a piece of her mind. I wasn't down there -- I was busy swimming in deisel. But she must have scared the shit out of them, because after she canceled the rest of our reservation, they called every other marina in the bight and told them that we had electrical problems and not to rent a slip to us.

What a pack of assholes. I'm pissed all over again. I just paused my writing to go review Conch Harbor on Google.

Anyway, I mentioned before that we moved to A&B marina. They treated us like kings, and I'll be happy for that to be my Key West home from here on.