Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Found the water leak! Boy, are we in hot water? After searching and searching for the water leak in the places I expected, I found the hot water heater having a pool of water behind it. So, I guess it’s time to replace it. Let me educate everyone about a boat hot water heater verses a house hot water heater. The house hot water heater is probably 80 gallons and uses 4500 to 5500 watts of power at 240VAC. The boat hot water heater is 6 gallons, yes only 6 gallons in size, and uses 1500 watts of 120VAC power. The home water heater is Ralph Nader’d to 120º in temperature so never to get hot enough in the shower to ever get you warm and making you use lots of water to get the 120º water to your shower head. The boat hot water heater can operate at 170º ! So, don’t make a mistake with this on only hot. But with a 6 gallon capacity and no quick recovery, very little of the 170º water can be mixed with lots of cold water and be comfortable for a shower. Also the boat hot water heater uses the engine heat while underway (180º water ) in a heat exchanger mode. Underway we use no electricity to get hot water and actually draw wasted heat away from the engine.
Uh, guess which one costs the most? Guess how heavy the boat hot water heater weighs? Guess how many more days we will have to pay slip rent in Oriental Marina to wait for UPS to deliver? OK so now you know a bunch about boat hot water heaters. Wasn’t it more fun learning about the merits of nautical miles and minutes of latitude yesterday. Anyhow, I BELIEVE, i can change the hot water heater as it weighs 25lbs. The new hot water heater should be here Friday or Saturday. Stay tuned.

What else did we do today? We walked to Nautical Wheelers http://nauticalwheelersnc.com to buy some shoes for me and a shirt and lots more stuff for Susan. We discovered Nautical Wheelers in 2011 on our first trip south. It has nice boating clothes at reasonable prices. My favorite clothing line is ExOfficio and they have always had good selection of those shirts. This trip they had switched to Columbia stuff. You can get Columbia stuff anywhere and it is good stuff. I just don’t like that damn PFG tag on the back. Columbia used to make really nice (TITANIUM clothing ) and then the average PFG stuff. Now it’s all PFG as far as I know there is no higher end Columbia line anymore. I switched to ExOfficio which I feel is a cut above Columbia PFG. Anyhow, Nautical Wheelers had NO ExOfficio shirts except on on the sale rack which I bought. The owners said ExOfficio had gone all urban looking with browns and stuff not tuned to boaters and they didn’t buy any. ExOfficio noted this and called them noting that their order was not what it had been in the past. Nautical Wheelers told them that brown and muted dark colors were not going to sell in the boating community. So, I guess I better take care of the Columbia Titanium and boating Exofficio clothing. Hey I don’t have very much of either of these lines. I just like them on the boat.
Today’s picture is two shrimpers at the dock near sunset.