Provisioning

We are preparing to leave Florida this week for good.  Now this is only if the weather continues to cooperate and we can get the wind generator hooked up and working properly.  The mount is supposed to be done by Friday at the latest.  We will be driving to Orlando on Thursday to meet up with some friends that are in town for the week and taking advantage of having the car for a day to stock up at the grocery store.  We finally received our LED lights and have them all installed.  We hope that this will reduce our power usage significantly.  Right now our days are mostly spent fixing or cleaning a few things on the boat, reading, watching movies, and waiting.  Dan, Preston, and Lucy all got haircuts last week.  It was my first time ever giving a mens haircut, and both turned out great.  Hopefully next time I can finish each cut under and hour!

Before and After

Free Diving

We have been killing our HOT days training ourselves to hold our breath and swim the most laps in the pool. The record so far is 1:47 held by me and the most underwater laps is 4 held by Preston.  We have an inch of slime building up below our waterline, another sign we have been on the dock long enough.  We are still managing to get one or two projects done a day on the boat in this heat. The fridge now stays between 40-42 degrees all day!  The extra insulation we put around it seems to be helping a ton.  Dan waxed the boat today and now we are spending the rest if the day in the air conditioned boaters lounge watching football.

Life on the Dock

As we have been living tied to a dock the last month there is one thing we all agree on, and that is we want to spend as much time on our journey "on the hook" not tied to some dock at some marina.  Of course living at a marina has it pros, but we are dying to get moving.  We received our wind generator and have been working on a mounting plate that will work with our canopy setup.  We also have been working on the SSB radio and finally hired someone to come out and take a look at isolating one of our backstays to use at the antenna.  He told us that because we are only receiving on our SSB not transmitting that all we have to do is run the cable up the mast with a halyard every time we want to use the radio.  Sweet, he just saved us a thousand bucks.  We also had the refrigeration guy out just to tell us to defrost our fridge and clean out the air intake on the compressor.  We did that yesterday and put an inch more insulation around it and are hoping today that our fridge gets below 50 degrees!!!  We also had a fabrication guy come out to take some measurements on making the mount for the wind generator.  It looks like that is all we are waiting on now and it should take about a week.  We also got new signs made for the forward port and starboard sides, because the original ones made were WAY too small.  It looked hilarious from 10 feet away, and at 100 feet away there was no way you could read it without binoculars.  Now as we cruise down the ICW no bridge operators will have to ask the name of our boat.  We are still going to the pool everyday working on our "zen" approach to holding our breath and swimming underwater laps.  Our goal is to become free divers that can at least make it down to the anchor and back!