We’ve been here eleven days, arriving 28 September. Had no intention of staying that long, but we go comfortable I suppose. The hurricane was coming, that never came. Then I was preparing to go last weekend and we found another engine issue with the same alternator.

So, finally, yesterday after messing with the marina here, and waiting again, for days on them, I took the old one in, found some one who fixed it, and the same place ordered me a spare.

We are planning to get out of here on Sunday if the weather holds a bit longer.

We will try to get to Deltaville for a day or so and visit with friends and after that, we’ll head for Florida, one day at a time.

Last night I put up the genoa and checked it. Awesome. We’ll be cruising with that sail for sure. The old one, the working jib is junky, and while it was ok, I couldn’t really coax much more out of it.

Between the main and genoa we should be able to pull 6 knots out of the boat without the engine. The mizzen sail is hopelessly stuck, and I’m going to need help getting it out of the mast. But, it is an ok sail.

I’m considering replacing both main and mizzen at some point in the future. Probably not new, but likely used sails. Then again, it will depend on the cost of new and used.

Refrigeration is not, and never has worked. JoAnne was good with that at first, now it’s a complaint. I guess that will be on our list to fix next or very, very soon.

With refrigeration we will need significantly more power than we have. That means more batteries, and a way to charge them. That means solar and a wind generator.

We have a small, 2kw gas powered Honda. It’s quiet, so it isn’t very noisy from a short distance from the boat. I had it running yesterday and couldn’t really detect the noise it made from a couple hundred feet away. So I can continue to use that as long as I can get gasoline.

The toilet in the back works. The Y valve is broken and everything always goes to the holding tank. That means pumpouts, docking, paying the costs, etc. The forward head toilet has a bad motor.

Electric toilets aren’t any fun. They are pretty new, but I’m either going to replace them, remove them, or make it so they can be both manual and electric or something. One more headache.

The former owner doesn’t know the size of the holding tank, but it seriously can’t be more than 20 gallons at most… if that. One more complaint JoAnne has.

Finally, there’s the bed.

The existing mattress is old and pretty much done for. It’s a closed cell foam of some kind. We bought a 3″ memory foam mattress I could modify to put in, and it worked. Now that is not so good. JoAnne spent the day at the boat show looking for some solution.

Priorities I guess.

Anyway, we will be moving on Sunday – I hope, or Monday at the latest.

We’ll figure out our plans for the boat as we go.

On the bright side, we met Linn Pardey today. She was nice and allowed us to have a picture taken with her.

We met Kurt Seastead – he’s the owner of the Facebook group for the Transworld Formosa 41s. Very nice man. We all walked around the boat show looking at things, kind of wandering around.

JoAnne and I had gotten there about an hour before him so we rushed over to purchase some headsets we need for anchoring. Neither of us can hear the other usually when trying to anchor the boat, so we got the headsets specifically for that job, though they are bluetooth and can be used on our tablets or computers for Skype too. They are charging now, we’ll test them before we actually need them.

Kurt went back into the show to look at boats. We moved on to get JoAnne out of the sun, and off her feet. We eventually came back to the area, stopped at Thursday’s for a beer, then came back to the boat.

Tomorrow I have to collect the new, spare alternator, get gas and diesel for the boat, prep a few things and take back the car we rented. Then we can leave.

That’s it for this update.