The Next Phase

Now that we are all moved in and situated in Marathon Florida, it is time to get the boat setup for sailing and daily living. Up to now we have only concentrated on getting the boat to Florida and into the water. Before we bought the boat it had not been sailed since about 1985 and nothing was properly rigged. We have a 20 something year old set of sails still in the bags, never used in perfect condition as well as a slightly used set. All the deck hardware is on the boat and all running rigging is still in excellent condition. We did a few sea trials to get used to the boat, sort the rigging and sails out, and also to decide if we wanted to change anything.

The boat really sails nice and we easily reached 7kts in less than 10kts of wind with just the main. The topping lift was missing which made it a mission to get the main onto the boom and we also decided some lazy jacks would be a good idea. This meant lowering the mast once again. The mast lowering procedure is fairly simple but does need still water so we motored up a local mangrove creek to find a quiet place with no dinghies going by. We fitted the topping lift and lazy jacks using our dinghy and got the mast back up in a couple of hours with no problems.

Lowering the mast in the Boot Key mangroves

 Some other mods we needed to make was to fit a composting toilet and an electrical system:

Fitting the toilet, a Nature's Head, was really easy. We just stuck it to the floor in the starboard hull and fitted a Nicro solar powered vent with batteries which runs day and night. The toilet works great and is easy to empty.

Our Nicro solar powered vent for the toilet

 

The electrical system is very basic; we only need to operate 2 computers, one small laptop for navigation and watching movies, a larger laptop for running my graphic design and photography business (Alan Bosse Graphic Design), the Garmin Echo 100 depth sounder, and for keeping our cordless tools and nav equipment charged. We fitted one 79Ah battery and a single 30 Watt Sunforce solar panel. This is working fine so far running the main computer 4 to 5 hrs/day 3 days/week but we will add another panel if necessary. Our lighting is from separate, solar charged, individual lamps.

Cooking was another area we want to address. We are trying to reduce our environmental footprint as much as possible and felt we needed to get away from gas as much as we could so we went with a Sport model solar oven from the Solar Oven Society. This oven is just amazing; we have made several delicious meals and even baked bread and chocolate cake. We still use gas to heat water for tea but we will still get organized enough to do this with solar.

Next: Preparing for the Everglades Adventure...........