UPDATE: We had our motor pulled...

The removal of our motor has begun!

Our last post we were still wondering when we were going to have our motor removed and rebuilt. Well, that day was last Wednesday.

Ben and a friend brought the boat over to the boat yard from our marina on Tuesday. The boat yard removed our rails on our port side and the door and framing around the door. This took most of the day as the framing was glued.

Why are we having our motor removed??? We have a cracked cylinder. This is a sleeve motor so Caterpillar is taking our block up to Tampa (as we are in Marathon) and going to diagnose what caused the problem. Next they will fix the problem, with a new sleeve or if they can't determine what caused this, we will be getting a new block. These motors (Caterpillar 3116 turbo) were rebuilt a year ago by Caterpillar and certified at 0 hours. We are so thankful this is covered under warranty AND that Caterpillar worked with us to make it as convenient as possible! It looks like we may have the motor back down here by mid-week, cross your fingers!

While the work is being done, we are in a boat yard directly across from our marina/resort where we have been staying the last month. We are fortunate that we can just cross the road (although pretty scary with traffic at times) to enjoy time at the pool, visits with our marina buddies and enjoy a drink at the bar.

We are still floating which has been very beneficial. We didn't have to find a place to stay, our power has been hooked up the entire time so we have all our creature comforts. Only we are at a boat yard with lots of noseums. Things could be worse, I'm just thankful we are all ok and that our boat will be fixed and we can continue on this amazing journey we started some 7 months ago!!

Check us out on Facebook here Jamminjanetravels  (I posted a video of the motor coming out)

Door has been taken off, and boat is prepped for motor removal

Our sick motor

Here you can see the railings have been taken off

Not much wiggle room here

Our boat has a full removable floor making it easier for this job. Check out how close to my fruit they are!! 

She's out!!

We luuuuuuv visitors!!!

But even more we love our friends! Kacie and Josh flew down for a long weekend from our hometown in Illinois. 

Within an hour we were on our friends boat, Liquid Assets, for an awesome ride.  Thank you Tim and Carol!!!

The beautiful lighthouse we get to see everyday!

Hanging at the pool! This is all they wanted to do, and we had no complaints!! 

We stopped at Key's Fishery for some stone crab claw and a small photo shoot! 

Mimosa breakfast, then to the pool!

My cute friend! We were born years apart, but we are so similar...its scary!!

We shared our friends with our Looper pals, Clark and Ev (Sea Moss) and Bob and Liz (Knot Sew Easy).

Because Crocket is so good, he gets to hang at the pool with us!

Time at the pool with fellow Loopers, Julie and Tom (Sum Escape) who we met through our Grand Banks Cruising Club.

Buddy Josh. This guy is a mini version of Ben...creepy!

Our last night out! Gonna miss you guys!! Thanks for the visit!

When things go wrong...

I have been putting off writing this post for a month now. Which happens to be how long we have been here in Marathon, FL.
We have been trying to think positive and have a good time with our friends in this beautiful spot. AND we have been having a terrific time with our buddies.

But...we have boat issues...

10 minutes before we left Naples (with a buddy boat) we had a toilet issue, lets just say we had a minor eruption of #2 in our engine room. YUCK! Of course, I was the one who used the toilet last. Not enough time to deal with it before we leave...So, this was waiting for us when we arrived. Luckily, my sexy husband is handy and has a mask to shield out the smell. After some research, since we are new to VacuFlush toilets, Ben narrowed the problem down to a failed diaphragm in the pump. He ordered the new parts, and had it installed in no time. Thankfully!!

Getting ready to go in!

We traveled 101 miles, in 9 hours, to get to Marathon. Half-way Ben ran the boat at 2200rpm (13knots) for 30min. This is when our trouble showed itself. As he was throttling back down, he saw the temperature gauge flicker. Leaving me at the helm, he did an engine room check and immediately let me know we have a problem. Our starboard motor had sprayed antifreeze all over the engine room. We limped her the last 4 hours to Marathon. After several weeks with mechanics from Caterpiller working on our motor, the diagnosis is a cracked cylinder. Our boat now needs to be hauled and the motor has to come out. In order to do that, we have to remove our side rail and the door and door framing has to be removed. As of this post we have not been given a day when the work will begin. We have an idea that Caterpillar will come down here, use a boat yard near our location and remove the engine. I believe they are trying to keep us in the water so we can still live on our boat. This is a huge bonus as we have our dog with us, making it difficult to find a place to stay, but also we can keep our fridge and freezer running (they need water to run). We have a ton of food in the freezer, which was for our trip to the Bahamas (which is not happening anymore...sniff sniff!). On the bright side, Caterpillar is standing behind their product and their work(Caterpillar rebuilt the motors on our boat and certified them at 0 hours). They are doing what they can to make this process as smooth as possible. I will keep you in the loop about the progress with this job.

Another issue we have encountered is with our inverter. We never connected our inverter on our old boat, so this is new. But this darn thing trips out the TV/Satellite whenever we have the A/C running in our main saloon. It also seems to run when I use my Keurig coffee machine. Interesting still, the inverter is not on, we are hooked up to shore power. So, Ben is doing his research and I have no doubt will find and fix the problem. Until then, we run both the forward and aft stateroom A/C units and we are still cool.

Having our boat only 2 months has been brought us a plethora of emotions from excitement to concern and everything in between. We are upset about our recent findings with our motor, yet feel confident in the work Caterpiller is doing and anxious to get our girl fixed and back moving. We are canceling our plans to head further south to the Bahamas. We want to be able to spend a couple months and our boat issues are interfering with our time. The Bahamas are not going anywhere and we will visit them in the near future (2017).

So, we stay here in gorgeous Marathon at this amazing marina/resort, Faro Blanco. We will be here another month. You can find us at the pool around 3:00 for happy hour!!