Lazy day after Paradise Hunter left for Vero Beach. Hopefully, it won’t be as long this time before I see them again. My current book is A Sail of Two Idiots.

Many day sailors were out this afternoon racing around the buoys. There is a steady stream of southbound sailboats, but it has been awhile since I saw a fleet of boats sailing. Not since Annapolis.

I liked how the solar panel wiring was tidied up on Paradise Hunter, so I implemented that tonight on my boat. What to do with all excess wiring has been an ongoing issue for me. I think I finally have a solution.

I was disappointed I didn’t do more to get Paradise Hunter solar working. The wires leading into the controller were reversed (positive wire connected to negative post of the controller), so we fixed that. I’m comfortable doing some things on my boat, and I installed my solar, but messing around on someone else’s boat after they paid thousands of dollars to have something installed is beyond my comfort level. Even though I have seen enough botched jobs, such as the example above, I still give ‘professionals’ too much credit. And they botched the Paradise Hunter install (probably because it ended up being rushed at the end due to the yard incompetence), or didn’t correct the manufacturing issue. Even on mine, I noticed one of the wires was labeled incorrectly. So it happens. But there are sailors like my brother Mark and Keith and some blog followers who could very well work in any boatyard and do a better job. So Keith dove in, got in the dinghy while it was on the davits (which I also didn’t want to do - how could those wires also be connected wrong?) and started following the wires. Solar is not hard - positive to positive, negative to negative. The mismatch was straightened out and now they have solar at long last. Christmas came early for Roger. And Tari still wants to know how come their every installation always seems to be botched? She’s noticed that incompetence does not come cheap.