Finally Back to the Boat

10 -25 January 2018

After just about exactly two months away we finally got back to the boat. The topsides were very dirty, but other than that everything looked pretty good. Some folks in the marina still had Christmas lights up on their boats.

It was cold and colder in Brunswick, which on the water can be brutal. We're still not well set up for cold weather on the boat. The rear unit in the boat is a heat pump, but other than the back cabin (which we use mostly for storage) it only has one small vent into the back of the galley. So we've never run it for heat only for cooling (really dehumidification). The forward unit we replaced in 2016 and is now just air conditioning. Heat pumps don't work that well at these temperatures, anyway.

What we do have is a little electric ceramic heater, but with much of anything else on the 120v circuit the breaker blows. Heather got me a 12v electric blanket last year which was a lifesaver on a couple of nights. At times I had so many sweats on I felt like I was wearing a sleeping bag. In spite of this, after a few days on the boat I was finally coming out of my cold. Of course, Heather with her teacher's tiger blood never really caught it. While huddled under blankets we schemed on scooting farther south next winter after hurricane season, maybe as far south as Vero Beach. It's about 10 degrees warmer there, but still above the outrageous south Florida docking prices.

Everyone knows the secret to boating is to keep the water on the outside, so the boat is practically waterproof. I was not as familiar with a side effect of this, that any water in the inside of the boat also tends to stay inside. Cooking, boiling water for hot chocolate and tea, even just breathing puts quite a bit of moisture in the air that has to go somewhere. This becomes critical as the boat cools down because the moisture will condense on metal hardware around the hatches and such then rain back down. So what's better than being cold - cold and wet! Fortunately, by the second week we were back the weather started warming up to where what had been the highs were now the lows.

Chelsea has continued to have test and procedures. Some aspects are already a little better, but some symptoms are still keeping her from being anywhere near 100% every day. Not fun. More results should be available after the most recent test completes later this week.

We had bags and bags of mail and other paperwork we had been dragging around for thousands of miles, and we're finally at the point where we just have to get things cleaned up before we can get on the move, much less leave the country for the Bahamas. I started wading through it a little bit each day. Adulting is rarely fun and I'm out of practice.

Please note that the final date for this post matches the publish date - I'm caught up! That just shows how much I really hate paperwork.

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