We're back at the dock at The Marina at Emerald Bay. That means washday. Free wash. The Island Breeze at Thompson Bay on Long Island charged $4 per load to wash and $4 per load to dry, but it didn't matter because the RO plant on the island was having problems so there was limited water and the laundry was closed. So a free laundry is a big deal. Plus it's one place where you meet folks. Ann from the trawler Cheers was back, Martha from DW Crow is still here. And I met Alex and Fern on Iolite, who read about and commented on our Rocna when I first wrote about it on the blog.

Also docking here are Cookie Monster and Wind Spirit that were anchored near us in Georgetown, and True North, whom we've gotten to know since meeting them at Warderick Wells, Big Major's Spot, Georgetown and Long Island.

Cookie Monster is docked two slips down with no other boat between. They were running their generator today and I noticed that besides the spurting water from the generator cooling system there was another stream of water coming from the boat, the steady stream from an air conditioner. Aha, thought I, since running the generator heats the boat, and since the generator needs a load on it (besides the battery charger) it makes sense to run the AC. We had always been running the water heater but another hot thing is not the best, and unless you're using a lot of hot water the water heater cycles off. I thought the air conditioner made more sense. Bud agreed. But we haven't used our AC since we needed the heat pump side in the bad old days. Bud checked the water intake - the filter needed to be cleaned. I checked the water egress, the seacock was open, but some stuff I had tried to store under the floor of the clothes compartment under the window in the aft cabin had slid down into the air conditioner unit. That wouldn't work. So I emptied the clothes compartment and pulled the stuff out from below. I had jeans and sweatshirts in that compartment, so I decided to pack those in vacuum bags and try to get the other stuff in there, too. That didn't work either because the bag was too big to get into the small opening for the larger compartment (there are a lot of compartments on this boat whose openings are smaller than the area behind). Anyway, I ruined two vacuum storage bags by catching them on the door latch of the compartment. So then I just put everything back and found three other places where I could store the stuff that needed to be moved.

Once that was done and the newly laundered clothes put away and the dishes done, it was about 4 PM and Bud was back with some groceries. I dried the dishes that were on the dish rack that sits on the freezer so we could put the groceries away, and boy, just like that another day is almost gone. So now I'm writing the blog. I hadn't taken any photos today and decided to just take this shot of the navigation station (nav station, to us) because some of you who read this blog have never been aboard, and you might like to see some of our very compact living space.

I do have some photos of our time on Long Island that I will add to the gallery. And, for me, the greatest luxury of all is being able to access the Internet from the boat.