Free A Sail of Two Idiots by Renee Petrillo Page A

islands or reefs). We made it to anchor by noon. Let the celebrations commence!
    Wait! Not so fast! We would have limited time with Captain Tim, so I wanted to run through as many scenarios as we could, particularly while conditions were conducive to do so (boy, did that turn out to be the right call). First we decided to get fuel at the dock (a first for me). I took the helm and put the techniques we had practiced on Allans-Pensacola Cay into play. I managed to get the boat to the fuel dock without running into anything (although I was screamingin my head the whole time—AAGHHH!), and the “crew” tied the boat to the dock like pros.
    Despite all the motoring we had done, we used exactly 34 gallons of diesel over the three days. It cost only $109 for fuel to go the 210 miles from Miami, Florida, to Green Turtle Cay in the Abacos, Bahamas, plus another $1,200 for the captain (including his flight home later). Not bad.
    LESSON 24: SIZE DOES MATTER Although I was advocating larger engines earlier, smaller engines mean lower diesel bills. Our puny 18 hp engines burned through only about a quarter gallon of fuel per hour multiplied by two engines. This could be less if we were simply charging our batteries at neutral, or more if we were gunning the boat through rough seas and high winds. Still not bad though. That’s why we didn’t complain
too
loudly about the engine size.
    We performed a few more mooring and anchoring exercises before quitting for the day.
Now
we could celebrate. Yahoo! We had done it! We had sailed from Miami to the Bahamas. On
our
boat! Can I get an Arrrr Arrrr?!
    I decided to call my mom to share my excitement and let her know we had made it safely. The two previous islands had been unpopulated, meaning no cell-phone towers, so I hadn’t had a chance to keep her worry-free. I babbled on and on about how great our trip had been, only to hear dead silence on the phone once I had finally shut up. Hello? Hello?
    Did I mention that about a half hour out of Miami our EPIRB went off? An EPIRB (emergency position-indicating radio beacon) is a satellite-tracking beacon that gets tripped only when you set it off during an emergency or it goes off by itself after hitting water, thus enabling searchers to find you. When we heard beeping coming from the unit, all three of us went to stare at it. You have to pull a lever to set it off, so it wasn’t as though we had accidentally bumped it. Yet there it was, beeping insistently. Inexplicably. We were starting to worry about it when it stopped about five minutes later. Maybe it was just calibrating with a passing satellite. Shrug.
    The silent treatment I was getting was from a distraught mother who thought that my boat had blown up and left her childless. The EPIRB beeping had caused the Coast Guard to call her and Michael’s brother—our points of contact—to ask if they had heard from us. The Coast Guard was calm, believing that the beeping was a false alarm, but our families had waited on pins and needles for three days—until my exuberant phone call. Oops.
    Since the Coast Guard thought it was a false alarm, they hadn’t started a search. I would have been a bit peeved at this except that, had they pulled out all the stops and found us sipping beers in our cockpit in the Bahamas, they would have made us pay for the wasted effort. We did e-mail the Coast Guard as soon as we learned of their involvement to allow them to close the case with confidence.
    I can’t imagine how scary the wait must have been for our families, but I still can’t help laughing every time I tell that story. Looking back, I am surprised that our experienced Captain Tim hadn’t done something more, such as get on the VHF to clarify the EPIRB issue with the Coast Guard. Oh well, another lesson learned.
    LESSON 25: LET ME SEE SOME ID Although our captain came highly recommended by a famous surveyor and did have a captain’s license, you