Last night we had a truly awesome storm (in the classical sense). The sky was constantly alight with the purple crackles of electricity! I caught quite a few pictures, but I didn't get a good picture of a lightning bolt spreading across the sky. Gorgeous.

For any new liveaboards, a friend told us about the wonder that is private postboxes. You can have the exact features as a P.O. Box but able to make it your physical address (including for the DMV) and people stop treating it like a P.O. Box (can ship expensive/heavy goods to it). This would have been very useful to have when we bought the battery. Also useful because my company can't seem to figure out what "mailing address" means.
To top it off, our post office keeps putting other people's mail (NOT addressed to our box) in our box, and we lost a small vacuum cleaner when I think they put that in someone else's box. Who knows what other mail we've lost to this idiotic post office?
When the 13 months are up, we're switching to a private post box. Hopefully it doesn't cost much more. The hunt begins in October...



After all the lightning last night there must have been a surge and it murdered our remaining house battery. The lights this morning were very dim and turning on one might turn off another. The lights are connected to DC power (meaning the battery system) rather than AC power. Thankfully our AC is connected to AC, so our AC works fine right now! (harharhar...Air Conditioner to Alternating Current.) So it was time to pick a solution.

We just sucked it up and purchased 2 WindyNation 12V 100Am/h AGM batteries, like our mechanic recommended. It came to less than $400 and had free shipping! It's what the mechanic uses on his own boat (he's a liveaboard in our marina) and has lasted him many years, so we expect them to work well.

I think the port side will still be overweighted though. Ugh. We might want to swallow some cost and just rewire the whole damn boat to have it be a little more centered. I'd prefer one battery per nacelle, toward the center, but that's probably not going to happen. This is the one downside of having a catamaran - the necessity of weight equivalency.