We woke up to the coffee pot making a fresh brew. Slowly waking up and getting our act together. We had breakfast and did our bible reading for the day. Then debated what to do and when to do it. We decided to run a load of wash. The things that had gotten wet with sea water, it takes forever to get them dry, and you can’t really put them in the dirty clothes basket until they are dry or they get moldy. If you wash them, they dry fairly quickly. We have a concern for water, and power. I don’t want to run the washer after we fill the tank next Sunday, as we are headed north on Monday and in case there is an issue we want as much water for that trip as possible. Tomorrow we have company scheduled to sail, and I don’t want to run the generator while sailing. Sunday is Easter and we will be going to church in the morning and running the water maker in the afternoon/evening. So, the laundry needs to be done today. About an hour of so later the wash is done, the generator is off and the battery is about 87% charged. The solar is trying at about 7 amps most of the time. But it is just not enough to really make any progress. We use 200 amp hours over night. The solar pretty much keeps up with our day time loads, but does not really get ahead on the overnight load.
A quiet day, sometime we just need that. I looked at instruments for the boat on line. Ours are from 2005, and the charts are old as well. I am leaning towards B&G instruments and chart plotter(s). A significant part of the reason behind the replacement/upgrade for the instruments is cameras. One of the cameras that we have seen on other boats and has great reviews is a FLIR. This is a “night” vision camera. This goes up the mast and has zoom/pan and tilt. Which means we could see where we are going at night. At least some and better than we currently have. Downside to this is the price, the reason we have not installed one already (Renee’ really likes the idea) is for the camera/controls and display it is probably over $20k, and it is important to note that it would probably not interface well with our 16 year old electronics. It would also require running more wires in the mast. We already have to take the mast out at some point and repair the conduit that has come apart somewhere in the mast, meaning some of the wires are loose inside the mast. Which means that when the boat moves so do the wires hitting the side of the mast and making noise, even when it is just he boat rolling due to swells at anchor. So, it is on the list for the upgrade rather than doing it separately.
