Our boat is tilting to port.

At 6:30 in the morning as I am reading the paper, I hear roosters' crowing. The other sounds we hear as the day progresses in this marina are navy jets flying overhead and people blowing conch shells at sundown.

This morning we did chores:  I cleaned the bathroom and did the laundry, and George replaced the shower pump.  First, he thought the float switch was not working.  After extensive testing alone and with his new best friend, Mark from Blue Willow, he decided the problem was the pump.  We had another pump thanks to the former owner. He and Mark worked on hands and knees for a half hour and got the pump working and put back together.  I wanted to take their photo, but I thought I would seem shallow.  So just try to picture two guys crowded into a two foot area between the bedrooms and the bathroom.  After Mark left, George vacuumed.  So we are clean on the inside of the boat.

Another issue we need to correct for Aunt Aggie is our fuel tank imbalance.  We've had this problem before and fixed it, but for some reason we are out of whack again.

Here's the technical background:  On our boat we have one engine and two fuel tanks.  Each tank holds 150 gallons of diesel fuel.  Each tank has a feed line and a return line.  Diesel engines pump more fuel than they need, so some is returned to the tank.  Ideally, the tanks would stay balanced, so the boat is balanced.  For some reason our boat returns more fuel to the port side.  There is no line connecting the tanks to automatically equalize the fuel levels.

The first time this happened we were at Midway Marina in August, listing to port.  We asked the dock master about the problem.  He had owned a boat with the same problem.  His boat actually ran out of gas in a lock because it would not pull from the full tank.  I said, "So what did you do?"  He replied, "I sold that boat."  It was a Sunday, and a kind engineer came out at sundown to look at our boat and tell us what to do.  George also called the former owner.  The decision was made to shut off the port side return line.  We monitored the levels for a week, and George tweaked the lines.  Finally, we had balance, which lasted until a few days ago.

As we were driving through Hawk Channel, approaching our marina, our boat was listing to port.  We were being sloshed by waves on the starboard side too, so we had a bumpy ride for a couple of hours.  George was worried secretly that we were going to also run out of fuel before finishing the trip because our port was full and starboard was close to empty.  Why won't the engine pull evenly from the tanks?  He did not share this worry with me until the next day.

We have had two dock workers come over to our boat and ask if we know we are listing.  You cannot miss the feeling when you are on the boat, but the attention was nice.

We have a plan for correcting this before company comes next week:  We will fill up with gas and thus be level again.  We can only really fix the problem when we are running the engine and tweaking the lines.  We have to move the levers, run for a while, check the levels, repeat.

I don't want you readers to think that just because we are sitting here in partly cloudy 79 degrees on a Friday afternoon, headed for naps and then downtown that life is perfect.  We have issues too.

Here are Louie (age 2) and Asa (one week) napping a few days ago in San Francisco.  Aren't they gorgeous?  I don't have any new photos from here, so Harper said I could share this.  Tonight I'll take some Key West pictures to share tomorrow.  Happy Friday!