7/19/2010 - Sightseeing

Makara is still on dry land. I hope by the end of the month to get her back into the water. In the mean time, we have been spending some time visiting along the south eastern coast checking out the various cities and towns. So far we have been to Charleston three times, Savannah once (there will be more) and Jacksonville. We go to Jacksonville primarily for the large West Marine Flagship store, i.e. BIG, and this last time discovered an old friend called Café Laredo very near the West Marine store. Café Laredo is a very good Mexican restaurant. There are several around including one that was virtually right next door when we lived in Dallas Texas. We were pleasantly surprised and immediately decided to hang around Jacksonville for dinner. One of their signature dishes is guacamole made fresh at the table, yummy. When we were in Charleston this time around we checked out several restaurants, all excellant, and spent some time walking the downtown area including the large outdoor market. In reality it is in a covered pavilion that occupies several blocks and reminds me more a bazaar than a market. We then walked out to the eastern waterfront and enjoyed the view. Later we went over to Patriots Point in Mt. Pleasant to pick up a tour to Ft. Sumter. Unfortunately we just missed the boat (literally) so had to pass on that. Fortunately the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown (CV-10) is moored there. The Yorktown is a very historical WWII era carrier that is now a floating museum. I couldn't resist that so we went onboard. There are walking tours of much of the vessel and a large number of historic aircraft to view. For those of us who lived through the early space program the Yorktown was one of the recovery carriers that plucked Mercury and later Apollo capsules from the ocean when they returned to earth. We had a really good time and also toured a late WWII era submarine that is also moored there, the USS Clamagore. All in all we found a good way to relax while Makara is indisposed and enjoy Charleston, a wonderful resource virtually in our backyard here in Atlanta.

7/9/2010 - Haulout Progress

I have been remiss is updating my Blog entries so it is time to get back to it again. I have expanded my Web duties from just content to actually providing Web-mistress duties as well. This basically means I now have enough knowledge to actually publish content on my own which should help the frequency issues quite a bit. I am a newbie at it so if I mess up the Web site from time to time, my apologies. The haul out is progressing nicely. The small electric water heater is now installed as evidenced by the picture above and the engine oil filter is now located in such a way that not only can I get at it conveniently, but I can actually get a pan underneath it (easily) to catch the oil goop that invariably comes out when you do remove it. You can very well imagine how this will greatly help lubricant maintenance on the engine, which I am fanatical about. Lots of other small fiberglass related tasks were completed as well. I will now have a place to put line hangers in the forward watertight compartment, the gas line can be run to the grill and we will have a much better deck shower arrangement. The bright work is in progress as well as the remaining mechanical work such as the packing glands and prop maintenance. The new NMEA 2000 depth and speed sensors are also now in place. The bronze thru-hulls were a definite improvement to peace of mind from a sturdiness perspective (I had nightmares of the old plastic ones being sheared away by ice). We must finish some NMEA 2000 bus installation once we are back in the water but it should not be long after that we can test these new sensors. I will let you know how they work as soon as I do! I am hoping with a week or two we can launch Makara. I have a number of projects that are on hold until she gets back into the water.

One little project, that is sitting right next to me as I type, is a revision of our on board PC. It is considerably smaller than the older one and uses considerably less power. We have switched to an Atom processor board (they use Atom processors in Netbooks). As we did with the old PC we installed a 12V driven power supply, eliminating the need for AC for the computer. We have run it through its paces and it appears quite perky enough to do what we need it to. We'll try it out in situ as soon as I can retool the mounts and get it back on board.