February 2, 2009.

We’ve been pretty busy everyday getting ready to head to the Bahamas. There’s been a bunch of little niggling repairs and the ever present provisioning.

When I installed the watermaker a couple of months ago I never hooked up the electricity. Since we were here in the states I was hesitant to commission the watermaker, so I just didn’t bother. I had all the parts so it was time to get to the electrical portion of the installation. It was only 2 short runs of wire and the installation of a breaker.

The high pressure pump is located under the v berth right next to our bow thruster. The bow thruster uses a huge shot of electricity for very short periods of time. This means that the wires that run from the batteries to the bow thruster are very heavy duty. I decided that since the watermaker also uses a good bit of power that I would piggy back it off the power supply to the bow thruster.

Since I was at it, I decided to remove the fuse block for the bow thruster and change it over to a breaker as well. So after a little bit of creative construction I had a custom bracket to hold the pair of breakers. We are now the masters of creating drinking water where before there was none.

The governor that controls the generator shit the bed again, but I was able to fix it in a few hours. Then there was the gasket on the oven door, sewing covers for the jerry jugs, rebedding stantions to stop leaks, repair of the damage from the Island Packet ramrodding, removal of the ICW mustache from the hull, repair the running lights on the dinghy and the replacement of a hatch gasket on the main cabin. Like I said, it’s just been a parade of little things, but we seem to be in good shape.

Christy finished up the majority of the provisioning today. That was the easy part, putting it away was the chore.
Not having the bikes on board really did free up an amazing amount of space and made things much easier. Just a few random odds and ends and we should be good to go.

It’s not all work and chores though. Jay and Di had us to dinner on Saturday night and then we attended a SuperBowl party on Sunday at Nancy and Jim’s house. It really was a great game and complimented the food and company very nicely.