Well, no pictures yet. We didn't get off the boat today except to take Fuzzy to the beach. When we're not moving we take Fuzzy ashore three times a day. When we're sailing, he sometimes misses the early afternoon run ashore.

Anyway, today we tackled setting up a place to hang an extra sacrificial zinc overboard. Zincs are put on boats because zinc is a metal that corrodes easily. The idea is that if there are differences in voltages that are causing light currents through the salt water around your boat, the zinc will erode before any of your metal boat parts do. We cruised for eighteen months from the dock at Tuscarora Yacht Club down the ICW and all through the Bahamas last year on one set of zincs and when the boat was pulled for the engine work last June they were still in pretty good shape. Since we've put the boat back in the water at the end of August we've been through 4 prop zincs and two shaft zincs. We added the galvanic isolator to keep stray AC current from a dock from coming aboard our boat. We had all the electrical systems on the boat checked out. Somehow we are still getting stray current. We never had a complete check on the engine while running, because the electrician from St. Augustine Marine Center was performing his tests when the water hose wore through. He says the new engine is hooked up exactly like the old one so there should not be a problem. There's a problem somewhere. Until we can find it we've decided to do an old cruiser's remedy and hang an extra zinc overboard that we can monitor. We're also hoping that that zinc will take some of the wear, as it can easily be replaced. The problem was finding a way to hook it into our neutral bonding system. We ended up running a wire from one of the seacocks under the bed in the aft berth (that seacock is bonded to all of the underwater metal fittings which are all tied into the engine, the shaft and the bronze grounding plates under the boat) up to a bolt on the new arch. We then clamped a wire to the arch and bolted a zinc on the other end of that wire hanging into the water. Bud zip tied the wire to a thin line so the line and not the wire takes the weight of the zinc. That simple little job took all morning.

After that we pretty much just took it easy for the afternoon. One couple in a dinghy stopped by. We chatted with them for a bit and exchanged boat cards. It was nice to meet someone here. We noticed in the afternoon that another Norseman has come in the harbor. We're pretty sure it's Barefootin'. We met them last year and again at Vero Beach. They are quite a ways away. Tomorrow we'll probably go into the Long Island Breeze and perhaps we'll see if it is them. I'll also get to use the internet there and get some pictures posted, but I didn't even take a picture today. Wires just aren't too interesting.