Thursday, December 7, 2017
Just a nasty rainy day. 54º this morning and the wind is still bouncing us around in our slip. We have decided to run the 51 miles tomorrow in the 40% chance or rain. Rain doesn’t bother me too much. I have the entire route programed into the Garmin Chart Plotter and it will tell the Autopilot where to steer us in safe water, taking care of the cross currents and windage. Oh yea, I watch all of that with an eagle eye. But for the most part it is rather precise in keeping us in good water. There are errors in NOAA charts and you still need to use common sense and actually look through the windshield to make sure everything is where it should be. But like many airline pilots. I take off and land. The rest of the time I’m on autopilot.

Cold, so Susan baked cookies in our oven. Burned the bottoms. I made a cake some time ago in a tube pan and the entire crust was burned. I don’t think I like gas ovens. I contacted the tech department of this EXPENSIVE oven and he said people had put pizza stones in the oven to even out the heat. So, a pizza stone is definitely on our list.

I continued working on my high water bilge alarm system. I spent lots of time deciding where I wanted to mount the alarm. I decided the fly bridge is where I run the boat from and I would like to know up there that the boat is taking on more water than the bilge pumps can get rid of. So now I have to run wires from the fly bridge to the bilge. That takes lots of effort. Cutting a rectangle in the helm area for the alarm is what I studied mostly. Got to make sure there is nothing behind there that I ruin in the cutting process. Also getting things looking proper is not easy on a boat. I mean a pocket level just doesn’t do much good. Sometimes it’s just a good eyeball. If it doesn’t look good I blame it on the previous owner or a mechanic. Anyhow, I got the Dremel out to cut the rectangle and decided to procrastinate that another day and didn’t cut anything yet.
Today’s picture is looking through my helm windshield at the dock at 6PM. We get underway tomorrow morning 7AM.