The weather has gotten noticeably cooler as we're still at a fairly high altitude, New York/Virgina zone and swimming has been less of a priority for the girls. Usually we can hardly keep them out of the water unless it's lunch time :)
Last Saturday, I woke up early and just before sunrise decided to take a swim to help wake up. It's pretty fantastic having a bay all to yourself and a refreshing dip in the sea is a pretty great way to start the day. (Strong Italian coffee doesn't hurt either!)
Swimming back to the boat, I decided to check a propeller we've been having problems with for some time. It is a brass folding propeller. Which means that while we're sailing without the engines, it's supposed to fold up and not create drag to slow us down (hey....on this beast, every bit helps!) but it's been acting up in that it sometimes won't fold closed or when we do motor, won't fold all the way open. Well, as I swam over to check it, I realized it was GONE!! The whole propeller! It is a very expensive item ($2000-3000) and it was totally missing!
I needed some breakfast to recover, and think about what we could do from here. Thankfully, we have two engines, so we could at least move to a marina, instead of trying to rely solely on sailing, but what then?! I remembered as we entered the bay the night before, I had revved up each engine separately and saw that they were creating wash behind the boat, something a missing propeller would not have done, so I cam e to the conclusion we must have lost it recently, maybe right after we shifter into reverse getting ready to anchor or something.
After breakfast, Levi and I thought we'd take a trip around the bay snorkeling, hoping we'd be lucky enough to find it, although it as a bit of a needle-in-a-haystack proposition. We started swimming in gradually larger circles, scanning the sand and roughly tracing our way back out of the bay.
About 400 yards away, lying in 30' of water, I spotted the prop laying on the bottom!! I couldn't believe it! I called for Levi to swim over and he dove down to retrieve it. 30' is a long way down, especially with a heavy propeller coming back up, but he made it on the second try and we were really stoked to have it back in our hands!!
I had a strange feeling of peace the whole time that I just 'knew' we were going to find. It was really bizarre, and I can't remember having that much peace about something that should have and normally would have totally stressed me out. I don't know if it was a 'test' or if I was, I passed, but thanks to God! we found it...................now we have the chore of getting it back on!
We'll see how that 'adventure' goes.
~Hems
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