Almost lost our mooring ball!

By Mike Jastrzebski

Not as in the dangerous, we could have lost our boat way, but more like a I should have thought things out and planned accordingly way.

As of today we have been in St. Augustine for a full month. I have been working on the rewrite of Stranded Naked Blues, and Mary is working part time in town. We’ve been paying for our mooring ball monthly and I planned to go down to the office when I took Mary to work. As an afterthought, I called the marina to let them know that we were going to stay another month. That’s when they informed me that I had to be off our ball by eleven since I was set up to leave today and they had reservations for all of the mooring balls. They would have one available tomorrow but we would have to move to an anchorage or a slip for the night.

The biggest problem with this scenario was that Mary had to go to work and I would have to move the boat myself. Not a real big problem except that when I went to start the engine a few days ago it wouldn’t start.

I did’t see this as a big problem, the engine turned over fine, it just didn’t seem to be getting fuel. I figure I probaly need to change the fuel filter and I planned on doing that this week when Mary was home. I didn’t want to give up my writing time to work on the boat.

Fortunately, as I dug out my work light and prepared to change the fuel filter, the phone rang. It was the marina informing me that one of the boats that had a reservation for a mooring ball had just called and changed their reservation to a slip.

I breathed a hugh sigh of relief, closed the engine compartment, and took Mary in to the dock so she could shower before work. At that time I went to the office to pay our mooring fee and while I was in there another boat called looking for a mooring ball. No doubt about it, I lucked out and I sure as hell am glad I thought to call the office this morning.

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