I woke up Friday at my usual time - five minutes before I needed to start work. Imagine my surprise when not only was my mast already stepped, but the boat was already in the slip. I also received at almost the same time, a text from the marina to let me know it was in place. I had hoped to get to watch over the glorious internet, but it was not to be. Oh well, I then went about my work day, the last before my slight vacation, and waited for the post office and UPS deliveries containing the few goodies to put to use on the boat.
Saturday, I put one of the items not meant for the boat, onto the deck of my riding mower to replace the broken tensioner spring. Turns out, it wasn't the same anyway, and as it was too wet to really mow as it was, I just left it with the new one just in case. I made a mental note though, to see if I could find anything at a hardware store that might work better. Finally, around 2 PM or so, I gathered up what I had, and a half hour later I headed out the door to begin the drive up. What surprised me was that it took me the better part of 5 hours to complete my journey, between stopping for lunch at Longhorn Steakhouse to use up a gift card, Lowes for some goodies like a spring, a couple of mixing buckets and sticks, and a couple crimp on lugs, Harbor Freight for a set of jumper cables and more lugs, and Wal-Mart for some food for the stay.
My plan was to make up a set of replacement battery cables for the outboard with the jumper cables, which warrants an explanation. I don't remember if I mentioned, but I had picked up a panel mount disconnect and a wiring plug, to then turn the outboard's existing cables into something more manageable. As it was, I couldn't hook up the motor to it's battery without removing the battery from the hatch and moving it closer. My original plan last year was just to make a small buss bar to jumper one end to the other, but then I had this brilliant idea strike me. Like many of them though, putting it into practice revealed weaknesses. Let me show you the two pieces and then see if you spot ahead of time, the issue. And no, it's not the wire gauge.
At first glance, they look perfectly fine. I cut the existing battery cables from the outboard, lined up my positives and negatives and hooked everything together. I plugged the outboard line into the panel connector, and pressed the button. Nadda. Ok, I thought, battery is probably dead from winter. Eh, whatever. It wasn't until this week, that I decided to look closer. It's very hard to tell, but if you follow the pos/neg orientation on the panel connector, follow the wires and see which side each is on leading into the back, and then try to match up the pigtails with the same... well, they get their signals crossed. It quite literally reverses the polarities. Ok, fair enough, let me try reversing the battery connectors, to see if we can get somewhere. And nope. My guess, judging by a quick diagram scan, is that there's a fuse under the cowl tucked away that blew the moment I had it hooked up backwards. Anyway, I'll get back to that.
I arrived Saturday evening, before the sun had fully set, but barely. First order of business was to empty the cabin, notably the boom, and the three pressure-treated 2x4s that I had stashed after abandoning my motivation last season to build a stern crutch for the mast. I could probably trade those for a full tank of gas on the way home... The boom went on relatively easily, and then I pulled my solar panel out, set it across the seats in the cockpit and hooked it in. Low as the light was getting, it didn't capture much, but, it did start trickling into the battery bank and assured me that the controller was still functioning fine. Right about then, the rain started yet again, so I retreated back into the cockpit.
I will say, the battery life on a new iPad for video playback is impressive. I probably rolled through a good few hours of Netflix, without dipping under 50 percent. My phone had been spared any torture, as I wanted to keep that as well charged as I could for the overnight. I had decided that I could live with the iPad dying out, but until I got more juice in the tank, I didn't want to have to charge anything just yet. I also laid out some Spider pouches and sprayed some stuff I had found, to see if it would have any effect. Other than smelling pretty, I think the cold weather was doing far more than these remedies. Short of a flamethrower, I'm really not confident in a good extermination plan.
Sunday was another overcast, rainy day. Actually, most days in the forecast were calling for that, because of course it would. In between drizzles though, I did manage to get the solar panel fully mounted, allowing for a little more angle control, and even through overcast skies, it was still capturing enough to keep a stream of atoms incoming. There wasn't much else to be done, so it was another afternoon of Netflix and Chill. Mostly because it had dipped down to the upper 30's overnight and the day really wasn't far into the 50s either.
Monday brought reprieve though. That would be today. We had mostly sunny skies for a good chunk of the morning until around 3 O'clock when the clouds started rolling in again. This gave me quite a few hundred watt hours into the battery bank, which was welcomed with open arms. The more, the merrier, I say. I took advantage of the slightly warmer weather and sunshine by replacing 5 of the clevis pins in my standing rigging, and giving it a good baseline dock tune. For some reason, every year this thing goes up, it has quite a Port-favoritism issue. I think I did pretty good keeping it in line this time though. But more importantly, now I have proper Stainless Steel clevis pins in place, instead of the generic multi-hole 2" long things that had been there before. They worked fine, but eventually I would've really started getting nervous about them. Now, I'm less nervous. I replaced the one on the forestay, the upper shrouds, and one of the two lowers. I still need two more for the other lower shrouds, and I need two additional ones for the split backstay. I hadn't ordered them yet, because they are a smaller diameter than the rest and I wasn't sure what size they were. I'll measure them before I head home and add them to my next order. I'd also like to replace the one that is tying the mainsheet to the traveller too, but again, measure twice, order once.
After taking an afternoon walk down the road and back, which was probably about a four mile round trip, I hopped over to the next town and grabbed some lunch, and a couple snacks for tomorrow. And now, I'm sitting in the guest house area, which has heat, and power, procrastinating before venturing through the rain and chilled air back to the boat. The rain is supposed to stick around until about 3 AM, pause for a couple hours, and then rain pretty much until Wednesday evening, including scattered thunderstorms tomorrow afternoon. To me, that seems rather boring. I've been stuck inside the boat enough already this week/weekend, and I have my second COVID shot on Thursday anyway. Tomorrow, I'll head home, refresh with a few good showers, and see what the weather for the following weekend looks like.
It's weird having all this time ahead of me to look forward to. Today was the first day off, but looking ahead, I still have not only the rest of this week, but next week, AND the one after that. That seems like an eternity at the moment. I can't even begin to imagine how it would feel to be starting a chapter of retirement or casting off for long-term cruising. Guess we'll see when I get to that step.
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