158: Fuel Tanks Crisis Part 2; Tanks Welded, Returned, and Installed; Marsh Harbor, Abacos, Bahamas

I felt like we were had. Wait, don't tell anyone. We don't want them to happen to you. Shame on Moorings. People don't talk about this. Can't wait to get these tanks. Hello, everyone, and Happy New Year to you. Yeah, Happy New Year. We hope you have a great 2022. And thank you so much for watching our videos and joining us. Our friends have blown away, got bikes. That's going to make things a little bit easier. That's Niko Kelly. All right, so we're going to test him out with our friends here. Hey, look at that. That's us. Wow. Do you want to take this out? The race out? Yes, please. I enjoy it. Oh, thank you. Hey, what are you doing? What? I'm throwing away the bag. No, that's from Megan. We can't throw that away. Why are you wearing your bike helmet on the boat? What are you doing? I'm doing dishes. No, stop. Megan and Nick use those. Hey, babe, can you please move your feet? How is it that every time I look at you, you've got that bag in your lap? It's Megan's bag. She made it for me. What are you looking at? You know, I have no idea, but I saw Nick do it. We want to give a big thank you to probably our favorite channel. Easily our favorite YouTube channel. I know none of you have heard of them. Ha ha. The O'Kellys. Nick and Megan, thank you. Last week, they posted a video and they boosted our channel views, our subscribers. We spent a week with them. They are amazing. Absolutely amazing. Authentic, as real as they are on video is what they are. They're not faking it when they do their videos. They just set a great example for the cruising community, for all of us to live by. Yeah, so we hope you enjoyed our little spoof. Oh, we just wanted to have some fun. Anyway, thank you, Megan and Nick. We love you guys. Can't wait to reunite with you guys in the Exumas. Thank you for all the positive feedback on our first video in this series about the fuel tank and the ticking time bomb. And in our first video, we talked about what happened and how we removed the tank. Now we're on to video number two, which is going to be about how our inexperience cost us time and money. What we did with the tanks after we removed them. And then why did we feel it to be urgent to fix our tanks here in the Bahamas? So that's kind of man. This is going to be a great video. Wow. You all things that happened to us. We want to redeem those. We don't want them to happen to you. And if they do, hopefully our experience and working through these issues is going to be of use for you. And some of you are probably saying, hey, but you're not talking about prevention and why our tanks corroded. Why is that? It's because now that we've been doing the research, there's a lot more to it than you think. And it really deserves the same video. Yeah. So it's going to be a three video series is what we're saying. Yeah, we want to have this in digestible portions versus drinking from a fire hose. That's a good way of putting it. First of all, where are we right now? Man, this is a pretty nice place. Yeah, we are in Tranquility Bay, and it is definitely tranquil and beautiful. And it's also known on avionics and some of the maps. Wait, don't tell anyone. Oh, maybe we shouldn't. Keep it secret. Holmes Bay is the name. You know what? We don't tell just anybody, but we do tell our viewers. Absolutely. Because they're special. And speaking of viewers, really special are our subscribers. That was a great transition. They're the ones that really affirm us. Our count has been going up tremendously here recently. And we're really thankful for that. It just it's very affirming that all the effort and work that we put in and time is helping other people. We want to pay this forward and really contribute to the cruising community. Yes. And a huge thank you to our patrons. Our list of patrons continues to grow. And we are so thankful for your generosity and your encouragement all the time. So thank you so much, patrons. We love it when you leave comments, hit the like button and share this video with other people that may be dreaming of sailing that are currently sailing. So let's go ahead and jump into this video. We have a boat that was built in 2015. It's seven years old. And really, the tank corrosion should never have happened this early. And there are a lot of reasons for that, which are going to be covered in the third video. But for now, we actually want to talk about if we had had experience, would not have had this issue. And you say, well, why is that? Well, back about a month and a half ago when we were making the videos for talking about our finances and what it costs us for the year, we went back and looked at our survey photos. We had like 300 photos that they took of the boat. It was a really bad condition also before they started the phase out. And that's repairing things so that private owners like us will buy the boat. Well, what we hadn't realized is when we pulled out those photos and found three that were of the fuel tank area underneath both berths, we saw trails of fuel coming down the ramp, just like we have been finding over the past six months. Mixed with corrosion. So shame on Moorings. Shame on our surveyor. What was his name? Listen, everybody makes mistakes also. But we were stuck in a really tough situation. First of all, we didn't know what we were doing. We didn't know what to look for. We're inexperienced. Knowledge is power. And that's what we're giving you right now. And it was right in the peak of covid season. And when we were looking for a surveyor, there was only one in St. Lucia. We would have flown somebody else and independent from another area. But that was totally impossible. So we had to take what we could get. It's just so important that the survey be done by somebody outside because, you know, they're intermingling friendships and relationships that are going on. There's some home cooking oftentimes. Not saying that's what happened, but that very well could have happened. Yeah. Perhaps the base in phase out tried to epoxy the tanks, knowing fully that this was a temporary repair, because we did have a few months where we didn't have any leakage. And then it started. So I'm guessing that they did a shoddy repair. And then we started to see the real effect of it coming through. I felt like we were had basically. People don't talk about this type of thing because there's some concepts that you're going to learn from next week's video. They're kind of hard to get your mind around. And all this stuff is hidden inside. But there's no anything that's protecting the fuel tank. One of our viewers actually said the boat is playing a game of hide and seek. It gives you these clues as to issues that you're going to find eventually that are become major issues if you don't deal with them. Really interesting. Thanks for leaving that. And really, a fuel spill is is hazardous in so many ways. That's something we never want to have happen. So we address this urgently in the Bahamas. Lorenzo said that CJ's welding was phenomenal, as did pretty much everyone we ran into. Lorenzo also said to us, your fuel tanks are not prepared to cross an ocean or to have heavy seas. And that was a big concern for us. So when we were able to get this fixed, we jumped on it right away. And what she means about crossing heavy seas is this corrosion starts. And you see the outside part of it. That's what you don't see. That's really going to bite you. And you may just see a small drip. But I'm telling you, if you're in the open ocean doing a passage, you hit a big wave. That's a ton of force. Yeah. And that can just knock that little piece of corrosion, especially you're going to have full tanks, right? Because you're on the start of a big passage. And that's a lot of weight and force. And you just don't want to go there. So the option was either fix it in the Bahamas or return to the United States and get it fixed in Florida. But when you did research for fixing it in Florida, what did you find? I called several places and they're so busy. It's months before they can get to it. And some of them have totally shut down custom work because their business is so big. And then you look at the price and the labor rates in southern Florida shot through the roof. And so replacement back in the States really wasn't an option. So we chose to go the way that we went after video one. We left you with the tanks being hauled off by Lorenzo and they were going to clean them and take them over to the welder on Monday morning this morning. We are up bright and early to head over to CJ's welding. And this is going to be I feel like it's a big day to find out our future here. All right, let's go. Has to say, I feel like we're at the doctor's office waiting for the diagnosis of Italy. Oh, man. So Charles just looked at the tanks and now we're going to hear the assessment of them. What I see there on one tank is one of the other tanks. I found four I could stick my knife through. It was only corrosion just to never seeping out through that. OK, I was corroded through. OK, now the problem is I can plate those areas. I don't know what the inside looks like. Maybe it's only those areas. But if I plate those areas, I don't know if it started to eat up on the inside. I don't know. Theoretically, a diesel tank don't usually do that. Do you have any idea why ours is doing this? It's electrolysis is what it is. You sit him down and if you've got a leak anywhere in the boat. Yeah, it'll attack it. We're back from the welder. Yes, we are. And we are semi encouraged, though it's a waiting game now until he takes a look at the tank. The starboard tank really needs to be assessed and inspected by him. So he's going to cut some holes in both sides of the tank and take a look to make sure that it's not corroded worse than he thinks it is. If all goes well, we could have the tanks back on Thursday or Friday of this week and maybe installed by Saturday. I think we were surprised to hear that he could stick a knife straight into the tank four or five times. That was a bit of a shock. Yeah, that's a big problem. I didn't realize even from looking at him that it was that serious. I'm really glad we we really dealt with these things. So the tanks were off at the welders. We were at the dock. And at that point, we needed to clean out the fuel tank bay where the fuel tanks sit, because as you can see, it was pretty disgusting. Probably never have a better opportunity to really clean everything out and just polish scrub that whole area. So Brown did a great job going forward. If there's a new problem, you really know from looking where it's at because it's so clean. So we got great news on Thursday morning. Lorenzo called us and said the tanks are ready. Come on over. I can't wait to get these tanks. Inside was all right. OK, and one of them, only the one without the pits to the bottom. You plated just the spots that had the issues. OK, yeah, OK. But other than that, the tank was all right. Great. Yeah, by the looks of things, it's condensation what it is. So that's the water being in the tank sitting. OK, thank you so much. Thank you for your work. Merry Christmas to you. We've just paid for the tanks. It came in $300 cheaper than what was estimated. That never happens. And you know what I told the welder when I saw him? What? That we were very thankful for him getting this done. And he was very thankful he was done with us, too. That isn't the best thing I've ever seen. Whoo! I'm not that bad looking, you know? Ha ha ha ha ha. I was talking about DJ. I know, right? Ha ha ha. Wow. Well, the tanks showed up on Thursday afternoon. I guess it was. Our heroes. Lorenzo and DJ brought them back, and the reinstallation was a little bit easier than the removal. So that was a good thing. They knew what they were dealing with. Yeah. So they put the tanks back in, and they also changed out all of the fuel hoses because we had a lot of dry rot in our fuel hoses. And the coolant hose. And the coolant hose, which we had been plagued with for a year that had dry rot through it. Yeah, thank you to Clay. Clay, the person who drained our tanks of the fuel, actually flew it in on his private plane. You can look inside there. She's really excited to destroy it. Oh, it's horrible. Oh, let me see. Oh, yeah. That's the inside of the coolant hose and how bad it is. That's just nothing but trouble, right? Oh, yeah, man. You don't want that in your heat exchanger. Then it blocks it up. Yeah, this is pretty cool. There's some good stuff. Let's talk a little bit about the costs, because as we said, our inexperience costs time and money. The time wasn't too bad for us. It was about a week. And the reason it wasn't a bad thing for us was because we were already waiting for some alternator parts. So we were going to be in Marsh Harbor anyway. But the costs were significant. To pump out the fuel, it was six hundred and forty dollars for Clay to complete that process. We needed to stay in a marina because we had no fuel tanks so we couldn't go anywhere. That cost was four hundred and fifty five dollars. The cost of the welder was six hundred and fifteen dollars. And the cost for Lorenzo and DJ to take the tanks out and then to put the tanks back in was six hundred and sixteen dollars. So this total cost was twenty three, twenty six. And that is a cost we shouldn't have paid if we had insisted during our survey that the fuel tanks were fixed. Or if they fix it, sure, to replace the tanks or weld them is probably not going to be fixed very well. We hope that you have learned from our mistake in this. And as we talked about earlier next video, we're going to go into more detail about why do we think this happened to our tanks and what are preventative measures so that this never happens to us again? We want to thank you for watching this video. Thank you for your support of our channel. We want to wish you a very, very happy new year and blessings in 2022. Thank you guys so much. Enjoy your day. Love you guys. Love you till next week. Have a great day.