Al gently commented that my blog content has been heavy in knitting content. So I'll focus today on strictly boating. We just finished a week cruise with my sister on board. Short shake down cruises are great for:
1. A change of scenery.
2. Finding out the most recent quirks that are going to wreck havoc on your bank account.
3. Great for giving Al practice docking in new situations.

What we discovered and learned from this trip:
1: We need a new aft head, which Al ordered by phone. Towards the end of our week our toilet gave up the ghost so it left us impinging on Cathy to use her head. Of course the cost for a repair kit is about the same as a new head, guess which route we took?
2. Al is gaining confidence getting into and out of slips, and he had a chance to dock against fierce current at Jacksonville Landing.
3. We need to have maintenance done on the Honda generator. It was giving us a bit of trouble at anchor when we wanted/needed it for some additional heat.
4. Sun glare from the water, early in the morning was a problem. Need to find a solution to the problem.
5. On this trip one morning we woke to seeing our breath inside. We were reminded how freakin cold we were 2 years ago on RUTH heading south, and were grateful for making the switch to Close Knit (sorry had to use the knit word).
6, CK can & did on a couple of occasions hit 12MPH (over the ground) only doing 1500RPM. This of course was greatly helped by the strong fast current on the St John's river.
7. We may have a problem with an unbalanced prop shaft as anything over 1600 rpm seems to induce a vibration. This may stem from when we had the transmission replaced back in Marathon. We had babied the engine & transmission all the way back to Palm coast from Marathon, & only on this trip did we open her up. We know the prop is good & clean & the zinc nut is good, so a call has been put into our wonderful mechanic Al to come & check it out.
8. We love our new fridge it is working out wonderful and is miserly in its energy consumption.
The photo is of CK at Jacksonville Landing from the bridge. We eventually were joined by another trawler that night. Every hour on the hour the giant Christmas tree and its lights danced to Christmas music. We were surprised we were not tossed about by the current or the continuous trips of the water taxi. It was a very fun stop over and we had an excellent dinner out at Benny's Steak and Seafood. We'd highly recommend it.
We will try to update our Picassa photo album this weekend, as we have a ton of pictures to get off the camera.