Shore Power

After lunch a good chunk of Saturday was taken up trying to connect to shore power. Think of it as the world's largest extension cord, with some additional features to reduce (notice, not eliminate) the chance of getting electrocuted while handling high voltage around water. It turns out our boat has a somewhat unusual shore electrical power configuration. It was supposed to be the next best thing 20 years ago, but turned out to be something of an orphan. Since electrical is not my strong point, it is always a struggle and takes time for me to work thru.

I wasn't going to worry about it because we are still at a temporary slip, and since we had asked for our version of power and they agreed, we foolishly assumed that that was what we were getting. Turns out our longer term slip has the same configuration as the temporary. So on a Saturday afternoon with many stores already closed we set out to come up with something, since we have only run the engine briefly since Thursday and our batteries are running a bit low. We finally found an adapter, but when we plugged it in our battery charger starting drawing 38 amps from a 30 connection. While this didn't trip anything or even measurable heat up the cord it made me nervous, so when we left the boat to head for the French Quarter we unplugged.

When we returned after walking around Bourbon Street, getting dinner at Mother's again, and a little early Xmas shopping, we plugged back in for the night. As the batteries filled up the draw came down, and this morning we are just in trickle mode. Enough amperage left to turn on the water heater! Since we're going to unplug the refrigerator this afternoon so it can defrost before we leave, we're trying to empty it out. After that, we eat out until our flights back to Phoenix leave tomorrow (Monday) afternoon.