Swing Set: Cruising Full Time
04/07/13North and South BiminiThis photo is looking south from South Bimini Island, actually from the tiki hut at Mackies Sand Bar at the Bimini Sands Beach Club, but more about that later. My blogs may not contain as many pictures as I'd like to publish while we are here in the Bahamas. Our current data plan only allows 800MBs of data transfer per month, and while this is an upgrade from the plan we instituted last week, it's still falls way short of what I'd prefer. We'll save data transfer on our MiFi device for email, weather and an occasional blog, hopefully at least once per week. Less pictures, and smaller ones, will allow us to retain the data transfer for the services we really need. After finding out at BaTelCo that we couldn't put their SIM card in our iPad, another... |
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04/03/13Finally in the BahamasOn Monday, April 1, we took a cab to the Marathon Veterinary Hospital so Holly could get her "physical" and health certificate for entering the Bahamas. Seventy-five dollars later, we were headed back to Boot Key Harbor, exactly one month to the day after her rabies shot. Her shot had to be administered no sooner than one month prior to her entry into the Bahamas, but we now also had, by law, 48 hours to check in at customs and immigration. We'd heard there is wiggle room in the 48 hour stipulation, but we hear lots of things. I'd filed a float plan with the Small Vessel Reporting Service, a feature administered by the U.S. Customs Service. This should allow us to enter back into the U.S. with just a phone call. I stated our last port as Marathon, knowing full... |
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03/31/13Back in BusinessAfter not having rain for quite some time, it's natural that on the morning we were to have the boat hauled at the Marathon Boatyard it would be raining. But we arrived at the scheduled time of 8 a.m. and waited patiently for Swing Set to get hauled out. Two hours later, we were in the sling. I purposely left the bottom alone for the last month, not scrubbing it or scraping any barnacles. I wanted to see how well our bottom paint was holding up. In my opinion, it wasn't. None of the running gear had any paint left on it at all. A great deal of barnacles had found a home on the hull, and there was plenty of plant life to go along with it. We'd taken Swing Set out three times and had run it up to speed, which I thought would have sloughed off the bottom growth, but... |
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03/24/13Wrapping Up a Month in MarathonWe had some very calm days at the beginning of last week, so we took the dinghy out to Molassas Key on Wednesday and were joined by a few other boats too. Some folks were watching something in the water that turned out to be a small nurse shark, maybe only two or three feet long, but it was still the first shark we've seen since we've gotten to Florida. I count this as a good thing. We let Holly swim around some in the shallow water, but she still couldn't touch bottom. We can tell when she is really enjoying herself because she doesn't make an attempt to climb up our legs or claw up the side of the dinghy right away, but swims to and fro, or around in circles. Our repaired wind generator continues to operate. SALT has informed us they're working... |
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03/18/13More Marathon NewsYou last heard news about our newly installed wind generator circuit board, and there were some "minor details" that needed to be ironed out. Hardly. I ran a rudimentary test suggested to me by Chris from SALT and was not able to come to any conclusion, so then I started looking into the paperwork that came with the new circuit board and I found that the wrong boards were sent from E Marine in Fort Lauderdale. It appeared that SALT ordered the correct boards, the ones for our Air-X, but boards for the Air Breeze were sent. No one at SALT caught the error, and thus the wrong board was put in our unit. They look identical, and everything lines up; however, the LED is green on the Air Breeze generator but red on the Air-X, and the circuitry is different. So what? Well,... |
