Fernandina Beach (Mooring Ball)

Wednesday October 15, 2014
30 40 238 N
81 28 171 W

We are in Florida! Just a short run over the border to Fernandina. We went straight to the fuel dock, pumpted-out and paid for two days on a ball. Nice day but a bit breezy.

Dropped the dinghy but I just could not get it to run. Most frustrating. I called Gene Taylor to get his advise -  he was on the way to the airport. We recovered the dinghy and over the next 60 minutes I removed and cleaned the carburetor and blew out the fuel lines. My conclusion was that the problem is the fuel pump - I will attack that tomorrow.

I like to take a few photos before I take things apart that I do not understand.

Thursday, October 16
This morning I removed the fuel pump and opened it up. I really have no clue what I am doing ..... but how complicated can it be? Apparently too complicated for me. Put everything back together and launched the dinghy and ......... no noticeable improvement.

So we located a local mechanic and called the marina to ask permission to pull up at the face dock for an hour or so. We used the crane to lower the dinghy on the dock and then loaded the outboard motor in a dock cart. The mechanics place was only a quarter mile away and I walked over dragging the cart. That all worked fine, so now we just have to wait till Friday morning.

We had a problem that a west wind was blowing hard and was pinning Tide Hiker to the dock. We watched several boats have all sorts of issues getting off. But the marina people told us after some discussion that we needed to leave the dock by 6PM, or they will charge us an extra $85! I was dragging my feet hoping the wind will go down with the sun................

At 6 PM the wind was still strong so we used a "bow spring" to spring the stern out into the wind, so we could back off the dock, and that worked well.

Friday, October 17, 2014
It was a beautiful calm morning so when the motor was ready rather than go thru the hassle of taking Tide Hiker to the marina we decided to paddle the dinghy the 200 yards to the dock. We picked up the motor in a marina cart and soon had it hooked up again. We stayed in town and celebrated with a couple of lattes.

The motor started OK but still seems to have idling issues. Oh well..... But we were still able to take the dink back into town for dinner.