We immediately realized that we haven't been keeping up with the blog. We have been so involved with learning the new navigation system (Simrad), learning the anomalies of the new boat, repairing things that we screwed up, and touring St. Augustine, that it has consumed our attention.
Needed to warm up. St Augustine 58 degrees
The Simrad navigation system provides excellent viewing of bottom depth, contour and whatever is swimming below the boat. The radar is intuitive and the forward scanner has already prevented one of the biggest problems we had with Doc's Holiday...dinging the props in shallow water! However, the navigation system is definitely not intuitive and a far cry from the Nobeltec system that we were very comfortable with after using it for 15 years. I hope with further experience to get comfortable with this new system, but as of this moment I still don't know how to get numbers for bottom depth or have the boat follow a course on auto pilot. This may be a software issue with using the Navionics charts that I just haven't learned yet so we will be working on that over the next few days.
"Travis Hardware" in Cocoa Village. Great entertainment and a lot of stuff. A must see!
We managed to get the boat to Vero Beach and rented a mooring ball for less than
$20.00/night. This allowed us to see how the generator was going to behave and forced us into learning how to launch "Lil Betsy"; see if we could row her comfortably (not fall out of it when launching and returning); and saved us the $100/night slip fee.
Buddies doing their morning workout. Vero Beach Mooring.
This is a more economical way to cruise the southeast coast of Florida but I estimate the cost of running the generator at about 1 gal/hr for 6 hrs/day (average since it is not hot yet) at 6x $2.70/gal at $16.62 plus the cost of maintaining the equipment.
In our case it exposed another lack of maintenance issue. The wheel at the tip of the davit (over which the cable runs) was seized up and put a load on the winch motor resulting in tripping and burning up the ground fault plug in the galley.
Trying to replace the plug led to the following scenario: a $30.00 taxi ride to the local hardware store to purchase a $20.00 ground fault wall plug which kept clicking off when the boat was on the inverter; which resulted in moving the boat to another marina that had an open slip at $120/night, so the electrician could replace the plug and check out the wiring system to make sure there were no other wires that were burnt; which also resulted in our having to remove our new Isotherm freezer; which resulted in a broken compressor line and total loss of freon; which resulted in renting an SUV for the 4 hour round trip drive to get it to the manufacturer in Pompano beach for repair.
Frustrated, I decided to keep on moving the boat and we would pick up the freezer when we got down around around Fort Lauderdale. Beth of course was also exasperated with having to move all her nicely vacuum packed meat to a borrowed cooler.... and watching it thaw! ( we ate well over the next few days)
So began our "Man overboard drill"!
In a foul mood I unhooked the power cable, prepared the lines so Beth could release them from the boat, folded up the boarding stairs and placed them behind the rails, grabbed the rail and when I attempted to hoist myself up onto the boat.....slipped and hung on to the rail with one foot dangling in the water......and not enough upper body strength to hoist myself up!
"Help! Beth Help! I cried, as I slipped slowly down into the water. By the time Beth heard me I was half way in and losing strength. Oh!....the things that go through your head when you know you are slipping and about to fall! My one overriding thought was..."Good thing this is from a boat and not the side of a bridge!" Clinging to the life ring Beth threw me, I found out just how hard it is to swim around to the back of the boat with clothes and shoes weighing me down. Hurrah! I made it to the swim platform then realized with a growing sick feeling in my stomach, that there was no boarding ladder and I didn't have enough arm strength left to push up onto the platform! Beth quickly rigged up a rope that I could pull up on and helped me get one leg up and roll onto the platform....thankfully it is close to the water. As I laid there catching my breath, I began to laugh at the foolishness of not having installed a boarding ladder and my laziness in not continuing to exercise to try and maintain the inevitable sarcopenia (loss of muscle ) that occurs with aging.
A well deserved berating filled my ears for the next 45 minutes!
The trevails of boating!
The electric works fine when we are plugged in to shore power or when using the generator so it has something to do with running the inverter. To hell with it we were continuing on!
We spent the next night at a marina in Boynton Beach. Up at dawn we continued down the ICW and it's many bridges to pass through Fort Lauderdale with it's luxurious water side homes to arrive at our current marina in Dania Beach.
Why the push?
We needed to be in a place that had easy access to a marine and hardware store so we could repair the electric and the davit while waiting for an adequate weather window to cross to the Bahamas.
