All dressed up with nowhere to go…

You work hard and you plan everything but in the end, are you ever really ready?

We haven’t been great about taking the boat out since we moved aboard. As you can imagine, we have mostly focused on the transition to living in a small space. Just getting everything on the boat and out of our truck took weeks. We had to find every awkward storage space the boat had including the hidden ones.

Still, we thought it was time to get her out into the river for a joy ride. We planned everything out…we thought.

We went through the dubious process of stowing everything we had lying about the cabin.

We took the cover off our dodger.

We checked the engine out and made sure all of the fluids were ready to go.

We got the life jackets out and the kids excited to put them on and go for a ride.

Then we tried to start the engine to get out of our slip. It turned over for a split second then was dead. I realized quickly that the starter battery was dead. It seemed like it had just enough to maybe start so we tried it once with hope. Still nothing.

Luckily, we just happened to have a standard 12V car battery charger from when we had been at a previous marina. They had disconnected our power cables while we were away from the boat and when they put them back on they didn’t do it correctly so we came back to our entire house battery bank without a charge but that’s a whole different story.

I quickly setup the charger and hooked it up to the starter battery. I was determined to save our day trip since we had already put so much work into getting out.

Finally, after about an hour I had just enough charge to get the engine running. Everyone got so excited. We were ready to get out of our slip.

I was just about to disconnect us from shore power when I realized I should probably turn on the instruments. I figured since I was turning them on I should quickly check our depth. I knew we were near high tide but it’s always best to double check.

Our boat draft is 5.4’ from the water line. That means that we sit that low in the water so the ground has to be at least that far from us. Our slip has about 5.3’ of water at low tide. Most likely our keel has grooved out an area so it doesn’t actually sit on the bottom but it is very close. At high tide, we only see around 6.3’. The river we are located in is only around 5-8’ at the deepest points.

I looked quickly across each of the instruments. Wind was slow, maybe 5 knots from the West. Hull speed was zero as expected. Then depth…it showed 23.5’. I had to double take before it clicked that something wasn’t right.

I thought maybe it was just a glitch and I could reboot it so I tried. When it came back up all I got was “—“. After a quick google search and some frustration, I discovered that it was likely a failure of the display unit.

Now, if the wind sensor or even the speed sensor had gone out we could have still enjoyed our day but no. It had to be the depth. This is the one instrument on our boat that is critical for us to even get out of our marina.

At that point, the day was lost and the kids were let down. We decided to let the engine run for a while since it needed it anyway and it would charge the battery. I spent the rest of the day trying to solve the depth problem. The kids and Carolyn went into the cabin and found other things to play.

Sometimes you can plan for everything. It isn’t until you are ready to embark that you realize you missed something so simple. At least we weren’t leaving for a month-long voyage at sea…