And their off...sort of...well almost...So...we just went under the 60 day mark to departure. Actually we can leave any time but we are choosing to leave on May 1st because that's when our lease is up here at the Marina and that's also when Ray can take his General License Test for his HAM license.

In the meantime...

We finally have auxillary generator No.1 up and running correctly. It's the diesel one that came with the boat...anyway it's now putting out 125 Volts of AC type house power (we chose to power it up an extra 5 volts to handle the load when the watermaker is running). Also, we have genset #2 running smoothly. It's a Honda gas generator...more portable than the installed diesel...and serves as our back up to our back up.

Electric toilet, sump system, and water pressure system are all up and running correctly...I, sort of, expect this may be the only time we get to see everything up and running smoothly as other cruisers report so many problems with their systems. I don't know...we actually have pretty good systems.

Today working on the propane system. We've elected to store the propane out on the deck under the mizzen mast. We neither one like a closed locker for propane so we are going to tie the bottles down in box on the aft deck. Anxious to see this all set up and working as it requires some rather long runs of propane hose...ugh!

Corrected the refrigerator systems. If anyones interested: We have two refer units that both run on 120 volts AC or 12 volts DC. What the "manufacturers" failed to take into account is that when the AC goes off and DC comes on, the inverter cranks up and trys to run the refer units with modified sine wave AC instead of letting the relays kick them them directly to DC as required by the refer manufacturers. Whew! Way weird!
I'll be taking this one to the forum.

Also today (given time) we are going to start the communications system hook-up. This is not an easy task as it involves running lots of antenna wire for the HAM station, then two VHF stations, the AIS (automatic ship indentification system), NMEA chart and GPS interface system so we can run the DSC on the VHF so we could be theoretically found easier...yeah right...we'll see how that works.

Still on the list is the wind generator hook-up, solar panel hook-ups, covers for the dink and outboards, covers for the deck, windows and sunshades to cover everything.

Sandy is busy busy...studying for her HAM test, also working on taxes...whew! Who said retirement is easier???

Ray out.../