The “plan” was to leave Stuart a few days ago, after my last knee gel shot.  However, last weekend while Mark was finishing installing our five new batteries, he was going to clean up what he thought was a few drops of diesel fuel in the same compartment.  The photo at the left shows one of our three staterooms, which each have a queen size bed.  Under this bed we store our batteries and one of our two 80 gallon fuel tanks.  There had been a slight diesel odor, but we thought it happened when we filled the tank. 

When Mark felt under the tank, he discovered fuel was slowly dripping out.  There is only a small opening in the bed platform to get to the tank, as normally you wouldn’t have to remove it.  Mark spent hours taking the platform apart.  Before it could be removed and repaired , we had to get the diesel out of  the tank.  Several men came on Monday and emptied the fuel into two large barrels. 

To move this heavy empty tank out of its space (shown above), Mark wrapped a rope around it, then took the rope out a hatch above the bed, and pulled it up with the help of an electric winch located at the helm station.  When he had removed the tank, he  found the hole on the left side of the tank, as seen in this photo. (The hole isn’t as big as it looks.) What we think happened was before we got the boat in 2008, someone at the Lagoon factory in France got this tank for our boat and it had a plug in the bottom.  For some reason they didn’t want to have a plug in it or maybe it was defective,  so they patched the hole. Apparently it lasted just over four years.

On Wednesday, a man came and spent about five minutes putting a much stronger patch on the hole.   Now Mark had to get the empty tank back in its place. After that, he had to reconstruct the platform. This took the better part of a day.  Once the tank was back in its place under the bed platform, we called the people to put the fuel back in. Yesterday, the tank was filled with our 80 gallons of diesel.

Since we had to deal with this issue, everything else on the “to do” list was not getting done. During the past week, we have shopped daily, purchasing six months worth of food and other supplies.  The plan was to store them in the above pictured cabin.  We had removed all the bedding and were going to stack storage bins on the platform.  Meanwhile, the food has been spread out all over the boat, organized into bins .  Today, we got the food bins on the platform. 

As shown in the photo, we have 26 bins full of canned goods and packages of food.  Juice drinks and wine are stored on the sides.  We also have food stored under the salon benches and in several cabinets.  The freezer is completely full, as are the two refrigerators (dorm room size).  Our two propane tanks, one for the stove/oven and one for the grill, are full. We’re ready to eat, now hopefully the boat is ready to go.

One of the many mistakes we made when provisioning for our first Bahamas trip was not knowing about “sundowners” which are shore events where cruisers in an anchorage get together to socialize.  Everyone brings a snack.  Our “go to” snack is now chips with either a cream cheese/salsa dip or chips/crackers with a smoked salmon dip.  That is why there are two large boxes of chips as well as a cabinet filled with them.  Last time, we had to buy our snacks in the Bahamas at a much greater price if/when they were available.

There are still some things to be done, and we are exhausted, but we are determined to leave in the morning.  The forecast is for sunny weather, followed by several days of thunderstorms, so we’d like to get out of here to Lake Worth (Palm Beach) where we’ll go out on the ocean to Ft. Lauderdale and then Miami. 

We only have a five hour voyage to Lake Worth, so there will be no need to get up early and leave at the crack of dawn.  Also, we get to go on the ICW for the first time traveling south and we don’t have to check, and worry about,  the wind and wave conditions on the ocean.