The Life and Times of Captain D and his Pretty First Mate

With the upcoming repairs and renovation, "G" Dock is all but vacant, with just a few transients tied up and soon to be gone.  Many of the boats slid back to "H" Dock, to the west/left as space permitted, with our SV-Time and Tide among them. It's a mixed bag on H from the looks of it. Much more active with many of the boats sporting old, retired guys "fixing" things and such. One such sailor had all his chain out and was marking it with a "better" color scheme. Personally, the older scheme seemed to be just fine to me, but everyone is the Captain of their own boat. The winds were a bit gusty, but this captain managed to "twirl" the boat between the docks and glide her into her new slip. The First Mate took over the helm as I left the cockpit to secure a few initial lines. Easy-peasy. I have got a few items to check off my preparations list, then the First Mate and I will cruise a bit on Charlotte Harbor, and anchor out as the winte...

 Before we brought the boat south in 2019, we installed solar panels on the aft arch but I didn't have the time to hook them up.  I have all the components to do such, just lots of wire running in tight spaces.  We have a generator to top off the batteries so it was never an issue, power-wise, just noisy if we were down below. I did add a battery monitor, to keep up to speed on the energy draw.  It has Bluetooth and can be configured with an app on my iPhone. I recently powered up the solar panel controller to configure it, again using  Bluetooth on the same app.  The two components can chat with each other to let each know what's going on---solar charging, battery discharging, temperature, etc. The controller can take the energy coming from the panels, wired in series, at 96 VDC/800 watts and convert it into battery-friendly 12VDC to keep the batteries topped off.  We keep 4 larger wet cells, good for 200 aH, and this provides us with more than a day'...

 We've spent a few hours here and there over the last month on the SV-Time and Tide, oiling the wood, cleaning out storage, and washing off bird poop. One of the items on the to-do list was to crank up the freezer/refrigerator and when we did, it ran, but the cold plate didn't turn, well, cold.  I got the gauges out and found that the system was low of R-134, though I didn't have my adaptor for the can I had on board (long story, but it's in Tennessee).  One Amazon delivery later, and I was ready to add the freon. Cute little unit.  It's actually a commercial 3-phase compressor used for water fountains that is "pulsed" into life by the 12VDC control board. The unit only holds 5 ounces of the R-134 refrigerant at most, and it had a bit left before I started to top it off.  In less than a minute I had overfilled the unit.  10 psi on the blue dial, when it first gets going, is where it should be. I bled a bit out and started checking the cold plate temperatur...

On one of our recent golf cart rides around the marina, one of the larger custom homes along the northern wall had a very nice, color-coordinated pontoon boat powered by twin 425hp Yamaha outboards.  The weight of the outboards had the boat a bit low in the stern.  The owner can trim out the ride once he gets going, but until then everything leans a bit to aft. I looked up the base retail price on each outboard and they start around $45k without all the toys for trimming and raising.  The combined 850hp dwarfs the 56hp Yanmar diesel in our sailboat, and I'm positive the pontoon boat can go a lot faster than 8 knots, but the First Mate and I prefer the slow lane :)