Tag: Living Aboard

A Tour of Indigo Lady

Howdy folks! Sorry I’ve been silent for so long. My life on land does not inspire me to post about cruising very often. We’ve been spending a lot of time on land, and also taking friends and family out on Dumbledore for day trips. No big New England cruising plans for us this season. But now I have something to share that I didn’t have to create. So here you go.

One of my favorite parts of cruising is meeting new people, both the locals in the countries we visit, and other cruisers. Dave & I enjoy meeting cruisers of all ages; it gives us different perspectives on cruising and just living life in general. I also follow a lot of cruisers on social media, and occasionally we run into one of them. That happened this spring when we were anchored in Brewers Bay on St. Thomas in the USVI.

One afternoon, a young man dinghied over to introduce himself. He’d seen our boat before in the Bahamas and had been curious about it. Turns out that the young man was Adventureman Dan, whom I follow on social media. He chatted with us a bit, then asked if we’d mind if he interviewed us for a full boat tour and discussion about our solar electric setup. Of course we said yes. So here’s installment one, the boat tour. In the next week or so he’ll be posting a second video where he talks with Dave about the details of our solar electric system.

The video is a little over an hour, but if click to watch it IN YouTube, Dan created a clickable table of contents that allows you to choose to watch certain segments of interest. The table of contents is in the description under the video (click …more and scroll down a bit).

Since Dan posted the video yesterday, Dave has received about 20 requests for information. We’re looking forward to seeing more solar electric boats out there!

Thanks, Dan, for the fabulous video!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_rUUlnHr40c%3Fsi%3D0JJUlEiWiO1ZMc2M

If you’re interested in learning more about Adventureman Dan, check out the rest of his YouTube channel, Facebook, or his Instagram- adventureman_dan.

Until next time, stay safe and take care of each other!

Life on Lady- Making Granola

Okay, folks, this is our last day on Lady this year. Tomorrow we will pull into the boat yard’s harbor and move ourselves into the guest house. Lady gets hauled out for hurricane storage sometime in the next few days. We’ve been busy getting her prepped, and there’s more to do before we fly home Thursday, so I don’t have time to write much of a blog post. Instead, here’s a video in which I share the recipe I use to make granola onboard (complete with a blooper). If you want to know why I don’t just buy granola, you’ll have to watch the video. 😁

I will continue to post when I get home, because I have a bunch of stuff from this cruising season that I haven’t shared yet. Guaranteed I’ll post as consistently as I’ve been doing thus far this year. 😂

Until next time, stay safe and take care of each other!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4jJZb4epJWY%3Fsi%3DNpfsgK3L5_ki70IS

Bimini to Great Harbor Cay, Berry Islands

We met a cool couple our first evening in Bimini (if you’re reading this, hi Craig & Roxanne!). We chatted with them for quite a while on our back porch and planned to hook up the next day to ride around the island. Thankfully, Dave & I had leftovers to warm up because we were beat from the passage from the U.S. We slept well that night!

After breakfast Wednesday morning we met up with Craig & Roxanne, rented a golf cart for a couple of hours and tooled around Bimini. The first stop we made was at Nate’s bakery for some coconut bread and cinnamon raisin bread. (Dave made French toast out of the coconut bread next morning- yum!) We all had lunch at CJ’s up the hill from Blue Water Marina- conch all around in one form or another. I had the conch fritters- yum! After lunch we got a tour of their awesome boat. After that, Dave & I went for a swim at a nearby beach, took showers and walked down the road to Big John’s for dinner. I bet that place is hopping in a non-pandemic year. On this night there were just two couples and a guy at the bar. Lovely view, good food, wonderful service.

We caught up with our new friends after dinner and had them over for rum and conversation. They helped us with some planning for our trip to the Abacos and shared a lot of their knowledge of Bahamas to the Virgin Islands when we told them about our plans for next season. Thursday morning we tossed the lines a little after 8am. Craig & Roxanne saw us off. Hopefully we’ll stay in touch. That’s one sad part of cruising, meeting great people and having to part because you’re on different tracks.

We had a plan A and plan B for our crossing to the Berry Islands. Plan A was to go about halfway, anchor off Mackie Shoal for the night and finish the trip to the Berries on Friday. Plan B was to just go straight through to Great Harbor Cay and drop the hook in the dark in the same area we anchored in March 2020. The cruising conditions were gorgeous, so we opted for Plan B. We made good speed, averaging 5.5 knots. Just after the halfway point we started passing clusters of anchored and dormant cruise ships. We passed at least two dozen! Sixteen hours later, just before midnight, we were anchored. We thanked the weather gods with an offering of rum, had some ourselves, then hit the hay.

When we got up Friday morning, Dave grilled cinnamon swirl bread for himself and the coconut bread for me (I’m addicted!). We were very thankful we’d decided to cruise straight through Thursday, because Friday morning a band of showers came through. I don’t think it would have been as serene a cruise from Mackie Shoal to GHC had we opted for Plan A. We busied ourselves with some minor boat tasks during the rain. Right around lunch we dingied to the marina to arrange for a slip for the latter half of hurricane season. We had lunch at their little restaurant shack then dinghied over to the dock near the actual town to explore a bit. We found the local liquor store and bought a bottle of Bahamian dark rum. Then we came across a well stocked, small grocery store and bought a few items, then headed back to Lady for hammock time followed by dinner and a movie.

Today we had to dinghy to the marina for 8am to meet the guy at the marina who could approve and arrange for our hurricane season slip. We had a nice talk with him and headed back to Lady shortly after. Today was boat chore day. I was in the mood. I did some laundry (clean sheets!), thoroughly cleaned our cabin and head, which I’d been aching to do, and thoroughly cleaned the salon and galley. Dave helped clean the spots I couldn’t reach easily. Dave made water, made bread, cleaned the hulls (again), fixed a couple of rattling cabin fans, dried out the bilges and got dinner going in the Instant Pot. By 3:30pm we were cooling off in the water off our stern and shortly thereafter were in our hammocks with drinks. We opted for Dark & Stormies today. It’s neither dark nor stormy here, but the wind did kick up as predicted as a front settles into the area.

The big winds are from the direction we wish to head next. How long they will last is uncertain at this point, according to the forecasts. It’s windy but not bouncy in the harbor (we’re on the lee of the island- the west side, while the winds are from the ENE). Beating into the wind and waves to get to the Abacos would not be a comfortable ride, and we’d probably only make about 4 kts, so we will bide our time here in this very protected harbor and move on to the Abacos when the conditions are more comfortable. Until then, we will spend time exploring the island.

Be safe and take care of each other!

Poof- back in NH!

We got back to our land home last night after two days of driving and one night in a hotel. The temperature today is in the low 70s and I am wearing jeans and a light long sleeve shirt and not dripping sweat sitting still. I’m so happy! Being on the Atlantic side of the Keys was lovely, but being in the ICW and marina was almost unbearable. I will not miss the inhospitable late summer weather of southern Florida.

You will recall from my last post that our starboard battery bank and generator had both shut down and the port throttle was intermittently cutting out the port motor. Well, the port throttle finally failed entirely on Sunday morning and could not be revived. So we made the final sprint to Fort Pierce with just the starboard motor being driven by the port generator (just once in the morning until the batteries were fully charged), the port batteries and both solar arrays. Again, thank goodness for the redundancy Dave built into our system! We arrived just at slack tide, and with a couple of dock hands to assist, Dave parked her in our slip easily despite having only one motor. It would have been a lot more challenging if we’d missed slack tide. We took the rest of the afternoon off.

We spent Monday and Tuesday closing up Lady, which left us extremely sweaty and exhausted by each afternoon when we broke around 4pm for drinks. Monday evening I drove to Jupiter to meet my cousin and her daughter for a lovely outdoor dinner along the Indian River. We all needed some girl time and it was great! I left Dave in the hammock with a drink and music; I think he also napped for a bit. We’d met a couple of new friends at the marina in July and were able to spend a few hours with them Tuesday afternoon having socially distanced fruity rum drinks on the docks followed by dinner up the road, again at an outside venue where the tables were more than adequately spaced and the staff all wore their masks (properly, not on their chins). It was a good way to end our time at the marina.

Every time I come back from an extended stay on Indigo Lady, I am struck by the colors and textures of the interior of my house. It feels so foreign for the first few hours. Indigo Lady is predominantly white inside and out. She has a dull medium blue/black mottled laminate floor and countertops, dark blue pleather salon cushions and nondescript gray cockpit cushions. I’ve added colored bed sheets and some brown baskets but other than that she’s pretty much bright white fiberglass. I don’t mind all that bright whiteness when I’m on her; she complements the bright skies and waters. I would find that much white disconcerting in my land home in NH; it would not be the least bit relaxing. Here on land I like my cozy, earthy greens, yellow and garnet with the hardwood floors and cherry cabinets.

Late this morning we took a ride out to the Kittery Trading Post for their annual tent sale and stopped at an “honor system” farm stand on the way home. Now I have fresh eggs, heirloom tomatoes for canning salsa, plus some fresh veggies to go with dinner the next few nights. We brought some food back from the boat and we’d left our pantry here pretty well stocked, so I can put off going to the market until Monday.  

A tour of our yard today revealed that the rodents have left us two apples and about 1/3 cup of Jacob’s cattle beans, just enough to plant next year. It looks like they also may have eaten the heads off of whatever black-eyed Susans managed to bloom. The drought was not kind to my perennial beds. I hope they revive next year! My hardier herbs- sage, rosemary, thyme and oregano- survived nicely and some small green parsley shoots are hanging on. Still, the air is crisp and the area sugar maples are starting to turn color. Although technically still summer, fall is in the air- my favorite time of year! 

Now that we’re home I will take time to reflect on the trip and share my thoughts with you here over the next few posts. I’ll try to keep it balanced between the “ooh, ahh, look at this” stuff from our diving excursions and the realities of my continued efforts to learn to love living aboard.

Until then, stay safe and take care of each other!

Here we go again…

We are en route back to Fort Pierce, bringing this little excursion to an end. We expect to arrive midday Sunday. We are currently anchored just off the ICW a few miles north of Jupiter Inlet. We thoroughly enjoyed our time on the Atlantic side of Biscayne Bay, Elliott Key and Key Largo. I will share more about that in a future post, but at the moment I need to vent. 

I’m tired of our systems malfunctioning! Yes, it’s happening again. At least when a diesel engine dies, Dave can fix it, even if he has to wait for parts. He can do some troubleshooting of our solar electric systems, but most of our issues are design or programming issues that require repair or reprogramming by the company that made the part. In February we installed two each of “upgraded” battery, solar and generator controllers. These upgrades were meant to ensure we didn’t have another catastrophic double system failure like the one last November that left us disabled 80nm offshore of Georgia. We returned to Florida this summer in the midst of a pandemic not only as a getaway from direct contact with humans, but also because we needed to install our replacement LiFePO4 batteries (from Sweden) and our repaired throttle (from Finland). We finally left Fort Pierce on August 3rd hopeful that our systems would finally be reliable, and they were…until 3 days ago. 

We were back in the ICW, two days into the trek back to Fort Pierce. First, our newly repaired throttle started intermittently cutting out on the port side. If you don’t speak boat, no throttle means no motor. This had been happening on the starboard side in March, which is what prompted our sending it to Finland for repair. They were supposed to have also replaced the port part of the mechanism, and we did get charged for that, but apparently something went wrong. That in itself is annoying, but not stressful because we still had a reliable starboard system…until today. For some reason we do not yet completely understand, the starboard generator over-amped the batteries, resulting in the battery control box shutting down the batteries followed by the generator shutting down and losing communication with the system as well. Dave replaced one of the battery box fuses, and it immediately burned out again. He couldn’t get the batteries to come back on nor get the generator to wake up. This of course happened just as we were passing the Lake Worth Inlet, which is past the last decent anchorage for the next 3 miles! We found a tight place near a marina to drop the hook while Dave tried to trouble shoot further, which included a call to one of guys who has been helping us with our systems all along. Oh, and note the date- it’s Friday. So the European companies we need to talk were already closed for the weekend by the time this all happened, so they won’t even get Dave’s emails until Monday morning. 

After a quick lunch, Dave turned on the cross ship cable so that we could run both motors off the port generator and battery bank and our complete solar array. We’ve done this before and it works well. Thank goodness Dave decided we should have two redundant systems, which allows us to crosswire them this way, otherwise we would have been stranded, again. While underway with this cross ship setup, about 2 hours after shutting itself down, the starboard generator’s communication display suddenly woke up of its own accord. We left well enough alone and Dave will test it tomorrow when we get underway. We still had to contend with the glitchy port throttle, and it did need coaxing to restart several times, but we finally got to tonight’s anchorage and we should make it to Fort Pierce (fingers crossed). Today was our longest jump, 26nm. The next two days are 17nm and 15nm. I’ll breathe easier when we’re tied up to the dock in our slip!