I shouldn’t say we were total sloths. We did change the oil and fuel filters in both engines and reprimed the bilge pumps on Sunday.
After he was done, Matt went to start the engines… and nothing happened. Nada. They wouldn’t start. After about 30 minutes of troubleshooting (and a few choice words), he noticed that the kill switch to the starboard engine was just slightly pulled out. No fuel = no start. Rookie mistake. One engine solved and onto the next. Turns out that there was air in the fuel line in the port engine, so he bled it and, surprise!, it started up just fine. Hey, just two more things we know to check for if we ever run into this problem again. Since I’m not the best at troubleshooting engines, I worked on cleaning the boat, happy to be plugged into shore power again so I could vacuum.
We did manage to get out for a walk once the rain stopped and oogled some boats in Sportfish Row (our name, not theirs) which was a whole line of huge charter fishing boats. I can’t even imagine the cost of one of those, or how much fuel they burn during one trip. LOL, such a sailor thing to say! Since it was early November, most of the shops had closed up for the season, so we just sorta walked around aimlessly for a bit before deciding to go back to the boat and head out.
Just past sunset, about 20 miles out from Moorehead, we were greeted by a pod of dolphins, which just blew our minds! It’s like they we’re welcoming us out into the ocean or something. They started at the bow of our boat and made their way to the back, where they started jumping out of the water and doing all sorts of tricks. One jumped up about six feet, right off the back of our boat! For a split second we were nearly eye to eye with this dolphin. It was sort of like those shows at the aquarium, but about a million times cooler.