John and I awoke the next morning -- Tuesday, July 20 -- aboard Robin in Cape May Harbor, anchored off the Coast Guard Station. We started the ending and, to our surprise, the alternator was charging the batteries.
Fortunately, we looked again and found no charge. So I called across the Harbor to Utsch's Marina and asked whether they had a mechanic. They did, so I reserved a slip -- at $2 per foot (Robin is 40 feet overall) -- and we hauled the anchor aboard and motored across the harbor.
Utsch's mechanic borrowed my multimeter and determined that the job was beyond his ability. He suggested that we call Engines Inc. in Pleasantville, NJ, about 30 miles to the north.
I'd already called Beta Marine, the manufacturer of our engine, and determined that they had no distributors in New Jersey. But the Utsch's mechanic assured us that Engines Inc. was a reputable firm.
Engines Inc. dispatched a young mechanic, a polite and handsom young man who had his own multimeter. He looked at the engine and then laid on his hands. What he found was that our two batteries had wingnuts fastening the cables to their posts. Not a good idea, he said.
"You can't tighten wingnuts like you can a hex nut," he explained. And a loose wingnut could interrupt the charging of the batteries, damaging the alternator. He went to his truck and brought back four hex nuts, which he tightened on the two batteries. Then we started the engine and he checked the alternator's output. It was fine. Problem solved.
In the end, those four hex nuts cost more than $100 each, an expensive lesson if, in fact, I had learned that particular lesson. But there was an even more serious lesson to be learned.
The final bill from Engines Inc. is now lying on my desk. The young mechanic had spent less than an hour at Robin. The hourly rate was $120, he told me. I had to pay him to drive to Cape May from Pleasantville. The total bill was $462.24.
As soon as the mechanic was off the boat, John and I prepared once again to go offshore. We made good use of our time, getting showers at Utsch's facilities, and about five o'clock, we were ready to cast off the dock lines.
Joy's family was still in Wildwood, so once we made it outside the inlet, I called her and told her we were about to motor down the beach -- there was no wind this time.
We were the only sailboat off Wildwood when we passed, and the entire Butler family was able to see our limp sail as we kept parallel to the coast about a mile offshore.
And then we were on our own, steaming into the night on a northasterly course, aiming for Vinyard Sound south of Cape Cod and then an outbound passage to Maine off the coast of that cape.