Or Why are Scott and Freddi still in Fort Lauderdale...

We last wrote on the blog in anticipation of the Miami Boat Show. Depending upon how you look at it, it was either a disaster or a great event. On the one hand we spent way too many boat units, and the traffic at the SSCA booth was slow. We've decided that cruising sailors may tend not to be joiners - except our current 8,000 members (and us) cruising out there. On the other hand we caught up with many friends (old and new), made some long overdue gear decisions, and had a chance to meet many SSCA volunteers face to face for the first time. That said, the Miami Show will never be the Annapolis Sailboat Show for us and for many others; for that we have to wait till October! Our big purchase was a wind generator (a windmill to make electricity for the non boaters). We had settled on an English model that we have installed on several customers' boats and were at the show to make the purchase when we found that a colleague had moved manufacturing of his model from Trinidad to Florida. You know Scott--buy American whenever you can--So a K.I.S.S. Wind Gen it will be for CHARDONNAY.

One of the issues driving our decision to stay put in Lake Sylvia was our house batteries' entry into assisted living. The sun would shine on the panels or we would run the generator, and the batteries looked like they were accepting a charge, but as soon as we removed the charge they were quickly depleted. They quickly moved from assisted living to hospice care--losing their will to live--and we finally decided to pull the plug on the old guys and bite the bullet for new ones. At this point our friend Phil (FLIPPER) will say "I told you so," but we did manage to get 4 months of cruising out of the old battery bank, even if we should have changed it out in Deale before we left...

Installing the new batteries required that we be at a dock (ever try lifting one of those lead acid jobs out of your dingy?) so we tied up at the New River Marina in downtown Ft. Lauderdale. This marina, really side ties on the New River, is the place to be if you like watching bazillion dollar yachts going past at all hours of the night... and who doesn't like a little "star gazing" once in awhile. It was fun.

The less said about moving a ton of batteries on and off the boat the better; one picture should about do it! Matters were made worse by the following riddle: When does 181mm not equal 181mm? When you are replacing Trojan T-105 Golf Cart Batteries with Trojan T-105 RE (renewable energy) batteries, a newer and more robust model. Both are listed at a width of 181mm but once we took out 6 of the old ones we couldn't fit in 6 of the new. We eventually realized that the sizing chart was off a bit and a bit x 6 meant a full day of routing, sawing, chiseling and glassing to accommodate the new house battery bank... you really had to be there to grasp our frustration! However, once done we can again live on the sun alone for almost all of our house needs, and when the new wind gen arrives next week we should be in even better shape.

As long as the boat was in a protected place, we decided to join our friends Rich and Galena (LA MUJER) for the opening of spring training for our Washington Nationals. But that's another story...