Dec 30th - Jan 5th, 2012 Getting ready to leave Merritt Island

Can you believe that there are 9 batteries down here?  Maybe this is a Chevy Volt.

Repairs and Maintenance

One important task that I wanted to accomplish during our stay at Harbortown Marina was to correct the wiring to allow the bow thruster battery to charge while traveling.  A bow thruster, for those who aren't familiar with things nautical, is a separate electric motor driven propeller that moves the bow to port or to starboard with the push of a button. It is mounted in an 8 inch tunnel in the front portion of the boat.   This thing has a really big motor - 7HP at 12 volts.  It drains a very big battery in about 90 seconds of operation.  I don't push the on button for more than 5 to 10 seconds at a time to swing the bow around.  The bow thruster battery is situated in the bow, obviously next to the thruster motor as you wouldn't want that much juice flowing through long wires and overheating the wiring.  However you want heavy wiring leading from the engines and/or one of the battery banks forward to the bow to keep the battery charging while the boat is motoring along  and to add supplemental voltage when the thruster is activated. These wires are 1/2 inch to 3/4 inch in diameter and expensive.  When I bought the boat there was existing wiring in place for this task but it is disconnected.  I have been tracing this circuit off and on for some time and thought that I had figured it out.  Not so.  When I connected the wiring in the manner of my plan and tested the voltages everything looked good.  But when it was attempted to start the starboard engine there was not enough current to start.  Back to 1st base again.  I say again because the first time that I worked on this circuit, a 25 foot 8 gauge wire leading forward turned red hot and melted all of its insulation causing quite a stir among the crew.  I will keep you informed of future attempts to correct this problem.

Remember the barnacle encrusted props in a previous post? 

Well that half inch layer of barnacles on each side of the two props that we took off needed to be removed and the props stored in the locker on the swim platform.  Knowing that two days of cold weather were approaching tomorrow, the props would need to be cleaned this very afternoon in preparation for departure from Merritt Island on Saturday.  Glad that you asked....props are cleaned with "Acid Magic" and a lot of putty knife action.  After 2 hours of brushing on acid and continuous scraping the props finally were devoid of barnacles.

Must get this done as tomorrow it will be too cold. Hang on daylight.

Further Preparations for Departure:

We have taken down all of the Christmas lights, stored Wayne's sewing machine after re-stitching the binding on four of the aft side curtains.  The thread disintegrates in the sun while the canvas itself is still good to  go for years more.   The on board water tank has been pumped empty and refilled with fresh water and water purifier added.  The spare props have been stored and loose gear has been put away.

Also our chart plotter, which is a must for travel, quits working after 25 minutes when the radar is turned on.  This condition has existed from the day we took delivery of the boat.  One of those hidden maladies that you find after you hand over your $$.  After searching the web some months ago, I found a number of similar circumstances on other boats.  The solution seems to be to move the GPS antenna closer to the radar dome and thus below the angle at which the radar beam projects.  This change required crawling onto the aft hardtop and removing the small GPS antenna from the aluminum radar arch.  The GPS antenna was temporarilly positioned and then tested for five hours with the radar operarting.  Problem solved!  But there is no way to reattach the GPS antenna to the radar arch without removing the cable and rerouting it again.  For now I just stuck the antenna in place with a lot of silicome caulk as the glue.  Later a permanent mount will be accomplished.

Manatees
On New Year's Eve Wayne and his friend, Roger, were fishing off of Roger's dock.  One manatee came up to and under the dock many times over a 45 minute period.  We could have reached down and petted her.  I know it was a "her" because she would do barrel rolls right before us.  She even did a double roll to show off.   Here she is:

You can see her flipper as she rolls onto her back.

Happy 2012!!!  We stayed awake until 11:20 and then figured the New Year could welcome itself in.  We went to bed.

Our traditional New Year's seafood feast with Roger and Marcy

What Was Colleen Doing While Wayne Did All This Hard Work?

Well, she had a good time visiting with friends John and Peggy from Orlando, she finished several sewing projects and, super fun, she and another Orlando friend, Sandra, spent a day at Universal's Islands of Adventure.  We're both big Harry Potter fans and have been planning this trip since last summer so we could visit the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter.  It was stupendous.  Hogwarts School is faithfully represented and the streets of the town nearby are just as I imagined them.  We tried Butter Beer which is a delicious blend of a shortbread flavor soft drink with a butterscotch foam on top and we rode the roller coaster Flight of the Hippogriff and a thrill ride called Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey.  That last one simulates a wild broomstick ride following Harry himself and Ron and Hermione.

"Snow" on the roof of the buildings of Hogsmeade