November 11. We had a 55 mile day to Saint Augustine on the agenda for today.

I walked the dogs at first light and we were ready to get going at 0650. The Freedoms are heading south with us and were up and ready to go. The only problem was that when I turned the key, nothing……….

The engine turned over but didn’t even try to start. Somewhere in the back of my head I could remember a diesel mechanic saying “If a diesel cranks but doesn’t start it’s either a fuel problem or a fuel problem”.

We called over to the Freedoms and told them to get going and we’d catch up. Jim didn’t want to leave us behind. I told him that I was going to change all our engine filters, then bleed everything and see what happened. If I couldn’t get it started in an hour then I was just going to call Tow Boat US and have us hauled to a marina for repairs.

There was no use him sitting there for an hour just to watch us get towed to a marina. If I was able to get it started then we’d run hard to catch them. He still didn’t want to leave but I reminded him that there was a tow boat only a couple of miles away, it’s not like we were in the Bahamas.

Now that they were gone, I could start to get to work on the problem. I decided that after the beating we took the other day coming in Saint Andrews Sound that maybe we broke up some crud living in our fuel tank and it had clogged the filters. We have 2 primary filters in parallel so I flipped over to the “clean” filter; bled the system and she still wouldn’t start. So now even with this clean primary she still wouldn’t start so I thought that the secondary filter must have been the problem. So I changed the secondary fuel filter and gave it a go, with no difference. We’ve been running on that secondary filter for over a year so it was due for replacement anyway. Next I changed both primary filters and after thoroughly bleeding everything, Veranda started right up. Whew.

Once we were running, we pulled anchor and Christy steered for the first hour while I washed up and cleaned up my mess and put tools away. We stayed inside on the ICW as there has been a lot of wind lately and the ocean has been pretty whipped up. We still had 10 to 15 knots of wind and the route was almost directly south so we were able to put up sail for almost the entire day.

We arrived in Saint Augustine a half hour after the Freedoms. We both anchored just north of the Bridge of Lions right in front of the river front promenade.

It was an exceptionally long day as I find this section of the ICW to be one of the most boring sections of the waterway. I was also a little freaked about the way the day started even though it worked out alright.

We met up with the Freedoms for a quick happy hour in town where we recounted our individual days and then headed back to our boats early. Overall it was an exhausting day and I was pretty much asleep before my head hit the pillow.