Socializing with circumnavigators

Sunday 8 Dec, St. Augustine FL day 2: Pottering onboard and dinner with OCC Port Officers.

Gloomy day with wind and rain forecast till mid-afternoon, so we planned a semi-lazy day onboard. With the last resources of internet we attend to some emails and finances, and download a few more books. As soon as the rain starts the temperature drops like a stone and we take shelter inside, sealing ourselves in with the heater on.

It’s a good day for inside jobs and Glen resumes the “bimini solar panels” project. The 2 MPPT controllers plus the Mastervolt interface are already mounted in the engine room with ducting already in place. Just the wiring now. Today he links the MPPTs to the interface and the interface to the next Masterbus unit with an ethernet lead. Not much, but still a several hour job to run the new wires.

By 3pm the batteries have dropped to 50%, time to put the generator on and we run it for just under two hours. While it is running, Glen plays with the thermostat of the water heater to make sure this time the water is warmer than last time. And we do have very hot showers afterwards, bliss. Especially with weather like this.

At 4:30pm it’s time to go ashore and meet Tim, the OCC Port Officer for St. Augustine. He and his wife, Tracy, have invited us for dinner at their house. We have a great time with them, such a lovely couple. We listen to lots of stories from their circumnavigation a few years ago with the World ARC together with their 2 children and we share some insights on the Caribbean islands which we liked best. Plus, the dinner was so delicious that I left their place with a copy of the recipe 🙂 Thank you, Tracy & Tim!

What we also leave with is two deliveries and back onboard we eagerly open the packages. One is the Navionics charts for Central America and the Pacific islands, the other is the long awaited remote controls for the hydraulic furlers. This was probably the most troublesome order ever. Glen ordered these remotes to a UK provider in September, to be delivered mid-October. There were lots of back and forth emails and calls, lots of pictures exchanged, a few hiccups, and the products arrived yesterday, finally.
And as Glen reveals the content of the box, I can’t stop thinking “Oh, are those remote controls or red bricks?” They are enormous! Well, compared to nowadays standards when everything seems to be in miniature. In all honesty, I had a shock at the sight of these things. I try to pull some jokes, but Glen has none of it. I suspect that secretly he is a bit disappointed too. Along with the 2 “red bricks” (yes, a second one for back up) come 3 receivers, a complicated wiring looms and a circuit diagram. Guess who’s going to have fun installing that lot?! And when I ask how much we paid for these, he makes a funny face and with a distorted voice tells me he can’t even pronounce the amount, but it is on the bank account 🙂

Hyped up with the evening’s events we do manage to get to bed passed midnight.