Escaping Kennedy Point Yacht Club

So we had prepaid for a month to keep our boat at Kennedy Point Marina in hopes of seeing the Artemis launch. During the week we would drive home for work and come back for the weekends.

Little did we know this marina was going to be a nightmare for our boat.

The first problem we noticed was that the marina’s power supply was not providing a full 240 volts AC, we were only getting barely 200 Volts. This made it almost impossible to use our Air Conditioners, they would come on but would barely cool and sounded like they were straining. I brought it up to the marina owner the same day we arrived and he just blew me off saying “No one else complains”, so already I had a feeling this wasn’t going to go so great.

On the days we were at the marina we had to run the generator in order to actually run our Air conditioner. It was the only way to keep us and the dogs cool in the heat.

We also realized that they were dredging a section of the marina while we were there. So there was an enormous amount of silt and debris in the water. This caused our raw water pickup strainers for the Air Conditioners and the generator to fill with debris every day or so. That meant a good hour or more of Air Conditioner/Generator maintenance each time we visited the boat. Running the generator so the AC’s had a full 240 volts worked great until it would suck up more debris, overheat and shut down. Clearing the strainers wasn’t too terribly time consuming, but the amount of debris in the water would clog the line between the strainer and thru hull. The only way I could clear it was running a coat hanger with a hook bent into the end down the hose into the water. One day we sucked up a 7″ long plant of some kind. Fishing that out of the hose with a coat hanger was a challenge.

So after the second weekend down at the boat we needed an escape plan. Unfortunately, all of the other marinas nearby were booked solid. So we were stuck until we could head back north to Jacksonville.

The day that the Artemis was to launch we came down only to see that it was scrubbed so we decided to leave the next morning. Even though we had paid for a full month, we were leaving a week early because we felt like this marina was slowly killing our boat. At this point even on the generator the A/C’s just did not sound right and I was worried about permanent damage.