Titusville, FL

Simple lunch in Cockpit

We enjoyed a nice 5 hour run from the Banana River to Titusville on Easter Sunday. The weather was calm, both engines ran normally and there was very few people on the water. We made good time and arrived before 2 PM and put Tide Hiker on a ball outside the Titusville City Marina. After a quick lunch we put the dinghy in the water and headed in to check out the marina and the town.

The marina was "full" of manatees. We have seen manatees before, but not as many as this - maybe a dozen or more grazing in the marina. We had to be careful not to run into one because the props give them terrible injuries and scars.

We tied up at the dinghy dock and headed into town. It is a bit of a sad town, especially since NASA has shut down the shuttle program, which cost about 10,000 jobs. Did a light shop at not-quite-supermarket, bought an ice cream and headed back to the boat. Deidre grabbed a book and settled down in the cockpit, I did the same, read a few pages and promptly stretched out on the pilot house bunk and enjoyed a 2 hour snooze. Its a tough life, but some one has to do it!

Last night we grilled salmon on the bar-b-que and Deidre made a great salad. After dinner we decided upon a movie - a remake of Colditz - the Germans sure must be fed up with WW II movies by now. It was presented in two Parts - so we headed for bed after Part I, and will watch the second half another day.




Side note on the mysteries of  electricity.

One of the challenges of the boat for me is the electricity supply. The engines generate 12V power when we are under way. We can also get 110V from a dock (if we are in a marina) or generate it ourselves on one of two generators.  (The generators actually make 220V electricity, but it is split into two 110V "legs" which the operator (me) is meant to keep reasonably "balanced"). We also have a 940 AH 12V battery bank, that will run 12V applications and provide power for a 110V inverter, so we can run "light duty" 110V appliances on just battery power. The distribution of this 110V and 12V electricity is managed thru a two breaker panels, and there are a couple of devices that help you monitor and measure!

Needless to say I am a bit "out of my depth" with this science and so we have had our struggles. One such challenge is to make it thru the night on our 940 AH battery bank. There are also all sorts of rules relating to batteries, such as:

1. Do not run the battery bank down under 50% "state of Charge" (SOC) - very bad for them, apparently
2. Do not try and use a generator to charge them any more than 85% - 90% - the last 10% - 15% "soaking" charge is very slow and inefficient.

So in effect we really only have about 35% or about 350 AH of battery power to last us thru the night. If we use at the rate of 35AH, we can run on batteries for about 10 hours, but the problem has been that we are not lasting that long and alarms start going off at 4AM.

One issue is that we have a full sized domestic frig with a whopping freezer, and it runs on inverted power and seems to be sucking up our battery power. At the moment we only have 2 people on board - imagine how our situation will deteriorate when we have 4 or 6! I want to be able to live on the boat like living in a house, not walking around at night with a flash light because I do not wan to turn on any lights!So I plan to get some serious advice at the MTOA rendezvous later this week.

This afternoon is dead calm, not a cloud in the sky, but enough breeze to keep us comfortable. We have all our screens down on the west side of the boat, giving us plenty of shade. Deidre is in the RPH with a book.

There is not much traffic on the ICW, but this classy old boat just passed us to get fuel in the marina.

Tonight we plan to take the dinghy to a water front restaurant and have "a night out". Tomorrow we are heading north again, and hope to get to the Datona or Smyma Beach area.