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March 28th, 2007  Nancy has been gone most of the time.  She just got back from St. Louis from a meeting with some of her employees.  I think she goes to Florida next for a week and then to Oklahoma City for a few days.  During that time I have been bothering Steve, as he and Carlie move into their boat.  Steve, Carlie, Nancy and I went out for Dinner one night in Annapolis.  Steve bought.  Thanks Steve.    Then the next day we went to a chili feed at our dock neighbors (Sam and Sharon) house.  They have a Grand Banks 42 that is in the slip next to us.  The boats main function is to block the sun from us and delay sunrise.  Most of the normal dockies showed up for the wing ding.  It was a great afternoon as Sam had ordered in great weather, food and drink.  Really, Sharon did a great job with the chili and other dishes (hot dish, cheese dip, chocolate etc.)

They live along the Potomac River in a development about 2 block from the river and as we left their house we had to stop and take a picture of Fort Washington which is across the river from them.

 ELECTRICAL I rewired the wind generator and got it going again.  One of the butt connectors had separated about 18 inches into the stand pipe.  Bad me for not squeezing it enough to begin with.  Before I did that job, I rewired all the electrical gadgets (lights, fans etc.) on the port aft side of the boat.  Its just a little part of rewiring the whole boat.  I had done the starboard side earlier.

The cherry blossoms are starting to bloom downtown and the song birds are back.  Its just great watching spring arrive.

March 10th, 2007,  Winter has arrived AGAIN.  Summer is supposed to show up this coming week and maybe we will finally get a warming trend. The snowflakes were the size of snowballs.  I had to shovel the walk again. 

Nancy left me again.  This time she is having a week long meeting with some of the folks from her office.  Actually the meeting doesn't last a week but with travel and all that other stuff, it takes a week.  So the cats and I have been holed up on the boat during the cold spell. 

Steve and Carlie have made their final trip from Texas to their new home in Maryland.  They haven't moved into their new boat yet but should be doing that next week.  Just after they got here some of their friends from "G" Dock at their old marina showed up for a visit. This picture was taken on their new boat as friends gathered around.

ELECTRICAL..  Good news for us with the solar panels and wind generator.  During the last 2 months, we have been using only those two sources of electricity to power the boat.  Actually I did turn on the battery charger one time after 5 days of no wind and no sun (Winter overcast).  The batteries had dropped to about 12 volts (instead of 13.8) and it took about 3 hours of charging to get them back up.  Still not bad.  We had changed some wiring from the solar panels.  They had been wired to the boat through a deck plug-in.  I just didn't like that setup since I noticed the plug-in getting warm during generation.  That told me that we had a current loss with that arrangement.  Nancy and I rewired the panels using a heavy round electrical cord and then brought that cord through the hull using a type of puck to keep it weather tight and then made an electrical (soldered) connection to the rest of the wiring.  That allowed 100% of electrical transfer to the batteries and boy did that make a difference.  We are very happy knowing that we can leave the boat and do some visiting in different countries and the boat will take care of itself.  The new refrigerator works very efficiently and draws very little current from the batteries.  All is well.

CRUISING..  It looks like we will be taking the boat out of the slip for our first trip the first part of August.  Nancy has signed her retirement papers and her last day of work is the end of July.  We hope to leave just after that.  We want to go to New York and get a picture passing the Statue of Liberty and then continue on up to Maine.  We plan on coming back here for hurricane season then going south to the Bahama Islands for the winter and coming back here for the next hurricane season.  We will be keeping our slip here for at least two more years a home base during the bad weather.  After that we will be in the southern portion of the Caribbean for the next hurricane season.  Anyway, that's the plan for now.