Catching Up.

by Riley

Well folks, it's been a while since I caught you up on the progress. We are getting pretty close to our shove off date. The house is being packed up into boxes and it's starting to feel real. 

I was fortunate enough to acquire an autopilot recently, and was able to install with only one call to tech support. When I was a kid, I always wanted a robot to do my chores for me. IT'S BETTER THAN I THOUGHT! While I do love steering my boat, it sure is nice being able to take a break and eat a sandwich or go... you know.

This past week we took a short, shakedown overnighter. These are always good to give you a sense of what you have to look forward to. Oh, it was so nice. A cool breeze blowing, the sun was shining, but we were in the shade under our new bimini top, with books and magazines to read. When those got boring, I jumped off the side to go for a swim. Did I already say it was nice? 

All good thing must come to an end.

Night fell, and so did the battery levels. Our sailboat had two, 100 amp hour batteries. That should be good enough to run everything we have for a pretty long time. But the thing is, while I have just about fixed or repaired everything on the boat, I crossed my fingers with the battery bank. $$$. I'm frugal, not cheap! So as night came and I turned on the anchor light, I could see on the voltage indicator that something was up... or should I say, down. As I lay in bed looking through the front hatch at the light atop the mast getting dimmer and dimmer, I we had a problem. But hey, no worries! I'll just turn the switch over to the other battery. Haha, it was worse than the first. No lights, no fan, I went back to bed. But, Allison needs her fan. It's 2 am, so I do what I do best. Fix stuff. I put on my head lamp and headed for my tools. Believe it or not, I just so happened to bring along another battery! Actually two. They were free, so I didn't know how good they were. So at 2:30 in the morning I find myself sanding battery cables and turning a wrench while my headlamp is now going dead. "Work faster!" Allison yelled. Sweaty, bleeding and tired, I tightened the last bolt and flip the switch. Done. Crisis averted. Why does it always happen in the middle of the night?

Ok, I made up the part about Allison. 

The next morning all was good in the world.