Final Push to York Town

The next day we left a little later in the morning so the sun would not be in our eyes as we had to keep an eye out for numerous crab pots.  We were traveling 55 miles to Coinjock Marina.  As we motored across the sound the starboard engine kept losing RPM’s – we decided to drop anchor and go below and change the fuel filter.  This effort helped but did not resolve the issue, so we limped along to Coinjock.  At Coinjock they had a good selection of filters so we purchase inline filters and changed them and have our fingers crossed that this will work the next day. 

We then hit the Tiki Bar and had a few drinks and appetizers.  We stopped into the office again on the way back to the boat and found out that a bridge we needed to go through would be closed at 10 AM and would not open again until 6PM!!!!  This meant we had to leave at 6AM to make it to the bridge by 9:30AM (49 miles).  As we started out, we had gone about 5 miles and the starboard engine stopped.  We primed it back up and then it started.  Daryl stayed in the engine room to monitor the engine and found that he had to keep pumping the primer as there was air going through the fuel line. We reached the bridge in time to make it through and then we only ran the motors at 1100 RPM, and this did not pull a lot of air into the fuel so we could just continue on at a slow pace to our next stop.  We enjoyed the rest of the trip at a leisurely pace. We saw a Bald Eagle and we had to go through a swing bridge and lock combination before we headed into Portsmouth. We were amazed at the large ships and the restricted areas around Portsmouth and Newport News.

We arrived at Ocean Yacht Marina in Portsmouth, VA about 1PM.  We walked to the sister marina to purchase a new fuel filter and had lunch at the restaurant there. We changed the filter, and this still did not help the issue with the starboard engine so we decided to call in a mechanic and stay another day at Ocean Yacht Marina.  

We were lucky and Western Diesel was able to send someone out the next day.  It took all day to troubleshoot the issue which came down to the dip tube in the fuel tank was loose and needed to be re-installed properly. We also found some algae in the fuel line so we will need to keep an eye out for that.  We walked up town to get some dinner and met up with some fellow looper from Cincinnati that we had met in the locks. They were going to dinner too, so we joined them and had a great time sharing stories of our adventures.

We pushed off at 7AM and were headed out to Chesapeake Bay to the York River. The engine repair seems to have worked.  We traveled through Newport New and saw many naval ships.  We passed a naval base just in time to hear them play the National Anthem. We stood and put our hands on our heart as we went by.  The Chesapeake Bay was calm we had 3 mph winds and the waves were less than 1 foot. Since it was a Friday there were not many pleasure boaters and we did not run into any commercial traffic. 

We traveled up the York River to our next stop.  We boated over to York Town River front park just to have a look to see what had changed since we were here last (by land).  Then we went into the cove to York River Yacht Haven where we will keep the boat for two months. We spent a couple days getting the boat ready to leave floating until we get back.