Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Daytona Beach

A simple question for you all.  Would YOU trust this helmserer...?
Note the toe on the autopilot control and the fingers on FaceBucket...

Answer?  Yes I trust her.  She is actually double checking the Navonics app against the Garmin chart plotter.  Ata girl..

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Saint Augustine

The namesake city of my favorite saint.  If you have not Augustines confessions, you should!  The picture below is  Flaggler College, once the Ponce De Leone grand hotel, which put the sleepy little place on the map a century ago and the reason Henry built his railroad down the east coast of Florida. Ornate is not sufficient to describe the place.  It is so opulent that you need to buy a tour ticket just to see the college cafeteria which is the oval grand room surrounded by the largest collection of Tiffany stained class in the country.  I used to do stained and beveled glass in my earlier years, so I was agog at the spectacle.


Our stop here included lots of provisioning to get ready for the Bahamas.  Christine couldn't resist the Robinson Caruso hats made from palm leaves sold by a street vendor.  We are now all set..


I am now done fixing broken things on the boat.  I look forward to merely improving things that are already mostly working.  The latest thing was re-wiring the rather complex setup of alternator, external regulator, and battery isolator.  After an evening of study, I felt like I understood how it was all supposed to work.  I am not sure how the existing setup EVER worked since there was a gross wiring error.  Now corrected, we are now back to being able to charge house batteries with the main engine which saves us from having to run the separate generator while underway allowing us to do things like run the water maker while motoring.  Little things that can make a big difference.  We now have three sources of electricity: main engine, generator, and solar panels.  Redundancy is good in an environment where thing have this habit of failing.

Now that all the major systems on the boat are working, I can start in on my long list of improvement projects at leisure.  Ahh.....

Friday, November 6, 2015

It's good to be back in the Blue waters of the Atlantic

After a long Summer hiatus, we are BACK in the Blue waters of the Atlantic and we were welcomed back by a few of our closest friends.
We just completed our longest offshore passage to date.  408nm direct from Oriental NC to Saint Augustine FL.  Only one exciting moment when the alternator bracket on the engine failed, and Mark had to MacGyver a solution to keep us running since we were over 50nm from shore at the time.  Your standard boating adventure.