This morning, when we woke up, the plan was to stop in Stonington to fill up with diesel fuel and then motor for the next six hours and end up close to Down East Maine. We have recently noticed that our batteries are not charging the way they should be. The six hour motor boat ride was supposed to get the batteries charged. There is so much you need to know on how to maintain a boat, there is no way you can know everything. When something isn’t working quite the way you expect it to it’s time to learn more about it. That what Bill has been doing this week, reading up on, and analyzing our battery situation.

The first step was to stop at the fuel dock. That was an experience in itself. We got to the fuel dock at the lowest part of the low tide. It wasn’t obvious where the dock was so Bill called on the VHF radio to ask. They answered right away and told us to switch to another channel, which Bill did, but the guy couldn’t hear him. It turns out our handset in the cockpit was no longer connected, no wonder it didn’t work! Finally Bill got the portable VHF and called back again. Once we figured out where the fuel dock was we didn’t realize the water around it was so shallow. Luckily we didn’t run aground and all was good getting into the dock. To top it all off, they had a problem with their credit card machine so we think we paid twice for our fuel. Something else to have to deal with!

Finally we were on our way and Bill was paying more attention to the battery situation, it was not looking good. He decided what we really needed was to find a dock with power available on it to tie up to for a couple of days. We needed a day to charge our batteries to one hundred percent, and a day to equalize the batteries – something we apparently were supposed to be doing but never have. Dock space, or boat slips in Maine are not that easy to come by. Mostly they use moorings, or they charge a lot of money. Bill realized that the yacht dealer where our new friend Sarah works probably had a dock with power available and it was on the way to our next destination. We headed back there and found someone who was actually working on a Saturday afternoon. Dave could not have been nicer. He told us that sure we could use the dock, he helped us bring the boat in, he lent us a long power cord, he showed us where the showers and laundry facilities we could use were, and he even told us we could borrow the company pickup truck that was parked in the lot with the keys in it!

So now we are charging the batteries. The picture above is Moonraker on the dock with the ferry boat, that is on the next dock, going by us. We even went out for a lobster dinner tonight. Hopefully the battery situation will get resolved and we can continue north on Monday morning.