Never a Dull Moment
17 May 2007
It may seem trivial in the scope of things, but I must first report that I broke my toe. It happened two days ago when I smashed it against a cleat and it is so incredibly painful I almost think it would be better to be gone with it!!! I know part of sailing is the rubber toe thing but I have a low pain threshold and this has sent me over the edge. The toe is swollen, blue and, most importantly killing me. One newly formed rubber toe..nine more to go..yikes, the thought sends chills down my spine!
Our carbon monoxide alarm has been going off intermittently lately. We thought this was odd considering the fact that we haven't been burning anything. We don't have a generator, were not running the engines, stove or anything for that matter. We chalked it up to exhaust from another boat or low battery in the alarm (which we changed). Anyway, last night the alarm was going off with some regularity and still we were not running ANYTHING! So early this morning with the alarm going off, we called the fire dept who came out with their meter reader. They were picking up readings but were just as stumped as we were about where they were coming from so they called in one of their specialist and... Long story short, it was a faulty battery from the battery bank(like a car battery)! One of the batteries was buckled and was actually giving off a gas, which was not carbon monoxide but something close(not deadly). Needless to say, we are now replacing batteries with gel batteries. The battery had been faulty for some time but we thought the smell was related to the yard work and as all of you know had been working with the amps, wind generator etc. Again, it's hard to know what is normal and not when you have just moved on board. I'm just glad it was nothing serious and we had the alarms. If you do not have a monoxide alarm..get one!
In keeping with the spirit of things, we were hit by another boat yesterday. It didn't cause any damage but scared the hell out of me! O was away doing a trash run, the kids were in bed and I was returning some emails when I saw a boat trying to get into a slip, I looked up and thought "hey" and then I heard a scratch against our boat! Needless to say, I freaked a little, then after having a look around I realized there was no damage it just sounded worse from inside. The guy was very nice and came right over as soon as he tied up to see if there had been any damage and offer his apologies. there really was NO damage at all it just freaked me out a bit.
Other than that not much else to report. I took the kids on a full day of errand runnig so that O could get the batteries out etc. we were hoping to go for a sail today or tomorrow but apparently it was not meant to be. Oh well, we will have plenty of sailing in our future.