work, work and more work

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The winds are howling today as the cold front sweeps down on us. We are happy we got the solar panels screwed on this weekend! We spent yesterday running the wires for the solar panels, the wind generator, and future speakers and lighting. We had to pull old wiring out (don't want a spaghetti situation!) and plug some old holes. We also had to drill a bigger hole to fit all the wires into one place instead of separate locations as they were before. This meant emptying out the cockpit locker and crawling into it. Good thing it is big and I am small. We managed to fit all the wiring under the cabin bed on top of the fuel tank, tucked up with all the others. The junctions ended up in a perfect spot too, that was a bonus. We will maybe finish the wiring to the panel and the batteries tomorrow. The displays have been mounted at the nav station and need to be hooked up as well. It will be cooler for the next few days and more pleasant to work inside on that type of thing. ·It will be very exciting when they are all hooked up and we can go off the grid and test everything!

Today we are equalizing the batteries and Marty is doing research on the fridge compressor. Luckily they still make the same model because we have a specific space it has to fit in.... most of the setups would not work. We will need a new thermostat too- we think that is a big part of the problem. We are also reading up on how to split the fridge and add a freezer section in case we decide we want a freezer. So many ideas, so much reading material, so many opinions.

The wind generator is next up for investigation. It was wired incorrectly and we can only assume it has never worked properly. We hope it has not been damaged from the free-spinning it was allowed to do before we owned the boat. Now, with the correct gauge of wire and a display to monitor it, we will finally be able to test it and go from there.

We needed room on the deck to put the solar panels before they were installed on the hard top so we dumped our dinghy in the water. It has now been floating there for over a week and I can see that green slime starting to accumulate. I hope that's all that is clinging to the bottom so far....We will have to clean it all up again before we apply the bottom paint we bought to eliminate this issue in the future. I spent hours cleaning and scraping in the spring when we did not realize how dirty it could get.

We have a lot of other projects on the list, some big and some nice small ones. Next biggest after the instruments and fridge are done would be replacing the rear head's cupboards and fixing the front water tank. The list looks very long and daunting, but we are feeling more relaxed and more energetic each day. We have some really productive days and that makes us all the more positive. We will still only leave when the boat is ready, when we have taken her out for many test runs, and when we are physically and mentally ready. I am finished my last major project for work and I can now spend more time with boat projects and research, so that's a good thing too. We still have a lot of research to do for our route to Anguilla too. Never a dull moment! We will just keep on going until we are satisfied that we are ready to leave.

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