Thursday, December 11, 2014

December 11, 2014 GA making progress and buns

The heater kicked in about 7:00am after a big trawler left the marina.  I think they were the power hogs.  The outside temperature on my phone said 29 degrees.  I snuggled back into bed.  A couple things I learned about life on a boat in cold weather (and from growing up on the prairie in SD).  Hurry to the bathroom right after your spouse has been there, because the seat will still be warm.  Warm up your clothes under the covers before putting them on.  Now if anyone has any advice for Dave about my Christmas present, he’s looking for an adapter for me to drink coffee while still under the covers,  I’d appreciate any info you can give him. 

Today, Dave looked further into the AC/heater.  He found something burnt out on the main board.  We had that board replaced last winter, so we now have to decide if we can replace that part of the board, replace the board again, or get a whole new unit.  He checked to see if the AC still worked, and it did.  So since we don’t plan to spend a lot of time in cold weather, we have the space heater for when we have shore power, and we are getting a small propane space heater for when we are anchored, we may just forget about having in house heat.  Lots of boaters don’t have it.  That's the plan for now.

Then Dave moved on to the water maker.  He put in the new impeller and it ran perfectly.  Woohoo!   Then he ran fresh water to clear the lines.  Then he “pickled” the system again, because we won’t need to use it while we are in a marina.  Otherwise you need to use it at least every 3 days to keep the lines fresh.  We have water available at our slip.  We just have to use a hose to fill our tanks.  So far, we have had good water at every marina.  That may not be the case in some foreign countries.  So we do have a filter system attached to our faucet that we can use if we need to.  He also ordered a replacement impeller for future use.  Speaking of water, we now know why people put lemon in their water.  We have had some strange tasting water in restaurants in the south. 

I made buns from scratch using my sister Bev’s recipe.  Dave has always “loved her buns”.  So when I was looking through recipes yesterday, he said “why don’t you just get the recipe Bev uses.” And it was nice to visit with her and find out that she was feeling good after her decompression illness in Florida. 

Today, Dave hooked up our fog horn. It is removable and we will store it inside the boat.  But if we are in fog, we will mount it outside and run the wiring to it that Dave connected today.  We have controls for it on the VHF control panel.  It has settings for underway (by motor) one long, stopped- 2 long, sailing- one long and two short, towing-one long and three short.  Each one of these signals will sound every two minutes automatically.  If you are anchored in fog, you have to ring a bell for an extended time every minute.  Luckily, the fog cleared by the time we were anchored a few days ago.  We detached the horn, otherwise Dave would be using it as a PA system to “tell other boaters where to go” or practice his pirate talk. 

Our AIS (automatic identification system) wasn’t working after we arrived here.  There is one antenna serving 2 AIS (Icom and ray marine). The one antenna has a splitter for the two.  The cable going to the icon wasn’t seating fully, so he put a new vhf connector on it and now it is working.  I got to help by holding the solder for him. 

Dave really felt like he accomplished some things today.  I rewarded him with a great Italian dinner with the fresh backed buns.  They were good, but not as good as Bev’s.  Dave said he would gladly eat my practice buns. 
 

Before dinner, we both had showers in the marina shower house.  They were really nice.  I have only seen one shower house as nice since we started cruising a year ago, and that was at Gulf Shores, AL at the Wharf.  When I came out of the shower house, I was greeted by a beautiful sunset and a dolphin in the marina. 
Sorry, I didn't catch the dolphin on film



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