Just me and Cary took Sea Puppy out sunday and it was a beautifull day.. the temperature was in the high 80’s and there was a nice breeze till late afternoon.. The seas were very low.. maybe 6 inchs to 1 foot of swell and just the cats paws that the wind rasied on the water.. We were one of the first boats out on the water. We got out and sailed about 2 miles from the inlet and then turned around to go mess with Breck in Runaway his Cabo Rico 38.
(ive been calling it a Cabo Rico 39 but he told me its actually a 38.. lol even though its 40+ over all including the bowsprit.. oh well boats are weird)
After meeting up with Breck in his boat we followed him about 8 miles he was doing good.. running about 5 to 5.5 knots on a close reach.. I couln’t pull up on him but he wasn’t pulling away either. The wind was running around 10 knots. We finally turned around at 8 miles out from the inlet and started back. Breck stayed back and played with his spinnaker. I was glad we headed back when the winds just started dying late in the afternoon. We did sail all the way back to the inlet but we were down to between 2 and 3 knots by the time we hit the inlet. After going we slowed to about 1 knot over water speed.
I hated to do it but I pulled the jib down and cranked up the motor. Well I tried to crank the motor… LC Marie was going past about then and radioed us to see if we needed help. At about just that minute the motor cranked and I told them we were ok. talk about speaking to soon.. it died about a minute later.. then cranked and died and cranked and died… we still had the main up so trimed it to slowly move away from the shallows we had been heading toward. I yanked the cover off the outboard and low and behold… parts laying in the bottom of the case.. ooohhh not a good feeling… a quick look told me that some bolts and backed off and the plate that holds the choke adjuster onto the engine had fallen off.. the choke was not working and the fuel air mix was out of whack.. it would run for a few seconds and then have to much air in the mix and die. I fished the one bolt I could see out and bolted the mount back in with my multitool (great things on a boat are multitools) I was now able to get the engine started.. it still wasn’t right but I had enough control now to keep it running well enough to baby it back to the marina.. I will have to take my other outboard engine and put it on the boat and get that one fixed. I know what the problem is but not what is wrong with the mount to be causing it.. I’m not sure that there are not pieces missing that are making it not adjust correctly now.
Over all though it was a long but fun 5 or 6 hours of sailing.
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