After a successful sea trial and a satisfactory survey, with check in hand I bought Annabelle. we, my girlfriend and I, left Travers City, MI en-wrought to Hammond Marina with 5 knots of wind we motored the first two days. Kathy was not comfortable motoring through the night so I choose an island to anchor by, it took awhile to find a shallow enough spot to drop anchor 9' was what I found but by then it was dark and I couldn't get the Delta anchor to set I knew something was amiss but did not want to alarm Kathy anymore than she already was so I didn't sleep I just kept getting up every half hour or so to make sure we weren't drifting, when the sun came up I seen why I was having problems, we set on top of a rock field but with all the anchor rode I had paid out we wrapped around a half dozen rocks which kept us firmly in place. toward the end of day two as land started to slowly disappear our engine acted up so I made the decision to find a marina for fuel since that is what it sounded like, it wasn't, after getting towed into Ludington, MI filling only 16 gallons of fuel into a 75 gallon tank I knew that was not the problem, but hey its a sail boat right, we motored back out just for the engine to act up again just about 5 miles off shore so I went back in for further investigation. I wound up replacing the fuel filter which was filled with all kinds of junk and Kathy jumped ship and my daughter came aboard to bring Annabelle home. and with less than 5 knots of wind coming out of the SW we motored more for the next 9 hours till the engine stared complaining again so with no further ado my daughter and raised the sails and sail through the night making almost no progress due to wind direction and lack of wind so we tried the engine again and walla it ran for another 6 hours and complained again so again we set sail and carried on for the next few hours till the engine fired right up and brought all the way home. The problem with sailing all the way was no or little wind and it was coming in the exact direction we needed to go my daughter and I sailed as close to the wind as we could without loosing the sails. all in all I think Annabelle did a fantastic job getting to Hammond , IN I just wish we had the wind so we would have never known about the engine faults, but everything happens for a reason.
Stay tuned in as I begin all the repairs that need to happen before I can take her out to the deep end of the pool aka the Atlantic Ocean
