Mike Jastrzebski's Blog, page 28

Year of the Cat

by John Urban

I was sitting at the computer contemplating my next blog post when my playlist popped-up the song Year of the Cat by Al Stewart. I had recently heard from my niece who said she had been listening to the very same song over the holidays and it reminded her of old times playing my albums.

As I took in the song, the piano and guitar solos sent me on a Google search for the liner notes. I knew it was produced by Alan Parsons but I was surprised to see that it was recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London.

I had made my own pilgrimage to Abbey Road a little over a year ago. I took a few shots with my camera, watched some folks striding across the familiar cross-walk as others snapped photos of them, and then I did the same. At one point I figured I would get a closer look at the recording studio and I walked toward the front door. As I approached, I saw someone through the window to the right of the door. He was too broad in the shoulders to be Paul McCartney, too tall to be Ringo. Maybe a bit more like a young Gregg Allman with the way his hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

As I stepped closer to the front entrance the man’s image grew clearer. Black clothes, black beard. He looked a lot like Alan Parsons.

(Record producer/engineer Alan Parsons)

The writer in me thinks he was signaling a hello. Sally was with me and her theory is that the guy in black wasn’t Parsons, nor was he any other famous artist or producer; rather he was security. Sally’s reasoning is bolstered by the way his hand moved across his throat in a gesture of “cut.” Whoever this nice gentleman/thug was, I nodded and back-pedaled to the street. That’s as close as I got to that well-known center of creativity.

Readers frequently ask authors questions about where they do their writing. Often, the answer is disappointing as most writers seek only a quiet spot that allows for undisturbed work. I wonder if it’s the same for musicians, if it’s about finding a similar room away from the world where they can do their work.

When I think of Muscle Shoals, or Clapton at 461 Ocean Boulevard, or the Stones at AIR Studios on Montserrat, I imagine a charged atmosphere where songwriters first reveal their new material.

Seeing Abbey Road, I suspect that musicians, too, are simply looking for a quiet spot that allows their work to unfold…perhaps even a place where some member of the public won’t come up and ring the doorbell just as the creative energy is flowing.

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Stepping Stones

By Mike Jastrzebski

Today I finished installing my new CPT auto pilot and I got to thinking about how preparing to take off cruising is like writing. It’s all in the stepping stones that lead up to the finale. In writing a book of course the finale is publishing your book, the stepping stones your daily output.

Whether you write a paragraph, a page, or a chapter a day, you’ve got to take those steps one at a time until the book is complete. Some steps, like the first word, can cause you to think you’ll never get that book done. The truth is that if you keep taking those steps, eventually you’ll finish your book. There are no guarantees that it will be a good book, or that anyone will read your book, but if you don’t take those steps you’ll never know. And the thing is, that if you decide to write a second or third book you’ve got to get back on that path, follow those stepping stones until you’ve finished the next book and the next.

Getting ready to take your first cruise or your next cruise is a lot like that. Instead of chapters the cruiser is faced with a series of projects that have to be completed before he can head out into the open waters. These projects are as important in the grand scheme of completing a cruise as finishing 300 pages to complete a novel. When we completed our refit of Rough Draft in 2003 and started down the Mississippi, I had this warped idea that with all the new equipment we’d put on the boat and all of the work we’d done I’d only have to make occasional repairs to the boat as we cruised until we got tired of it. Can you tell from my attitude that I really didn’t understand what it meant to own an old boat?

I already mentioned that we did a major refit before leaving Minnesota. Two years later, following Hurricane Katrina, we had to do substantial repairs before we could head out from Mobile to Key West and on to Ft. Lauderdale.

Two years ago when we left Lauderdale after six years sitting at a dock, we spent six weeks on the hard preparing the boat for our trip to the Abacos. A bottom job, a new shaft, a cutlass bearing, and dozens of small projects were the stepping stones we followed before we could make that journey.

Last year, before our next trip to the Abacos, we put on davits, solar panels, added two more golf cart batteries, plus completed a dozen or more minor projects.

This year I repaired the engine which was overheating, added a water maker and a new autopilot, and we are currently in the process of replacing the transmission shift cable. I still plan to add a transducer for our chart plotter and do a bottom job before we can take off again.

So whether you’re planning a book or a cruise and you’re wondering if you can do it, just remember, it only takes a step at a time, or a page or a project. If you want it bad enough you can do it.

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A rudderless life

by Christine Kling

We arrived today at Majuro atoll in the the Marshall Islands in late afternoon. I am sitting here in the corner of a local restaurant in total sensory overload having just downloaded more than a thousand emails and there is over-loud music playing through speakers and a TV behind the bar and I just ate salad with loads of fresh lettuce.

For those who have just randomly found this blog on the Internet, let me digress and tell you how I got here. Back in November, a fellow commented on a blog post I made (via my dog Barney) and he and I started chatting online. It turned out he was on his boat in Fiji and preparing to make a singlehanded passage north to the Marshall Islands. Coincidently, I’d been writing about how much I yearned to make a long passage again. He offered to give me the chance to do just that and against all the advice of friends, I took him up on his offer. So about a month ago, I hopped on a plane and flew to Fiji to go sailing with this stranger. Crazy, right? Yeah, I know. Friends warned me that he might be an axe murderer and I might end up as shark chum, but as those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know, I believe in serendipity. Sometimes we try to oversteer our lives, and the result is never good for me. So, I decided to just go with it and I hopped on a plane for Fiji.

On our first sail out to the island of Navadra, the autopilot failed. At first, I thought I should take that as a warning sign. Let’s face it, among the things that can most mess up the “fun” factor of sailing is broken gear. But, it turned out this guy had the parts necessary to repair it on hand and he laughingly referred to his boat as a floating parts department. I liked that, and I decided not to hop on the first plane out.

So now, it’s just over a month later, and I’ve been on a boat at sea for 3 weeks and my psyche has experienced a seismic shift. There is something so vibrantly exciting about living life along that tightrope that is suspended without a net – and it makes the return to the everyday (even if it is the everyday in a very exotic locale) a little less alluring. Reality TV cannot hold a candle to reality.

So, on this passage from Fiji to Majuro in the Marshall Islands, we covered something like 1800+ miles. I had many hours on long night watches to think and be unplugged and contemplate the universe. The question of what is important in life always rises to the top for me, and I had so much time to put my priorities in order. I love looking at the night sky and thinking about how minuscule I am in regard to the blazing Milky Way. As it turned out, the axe never appeared and Wayne, the captain, and I had lots of time to talk and laugh and think.

But when we were 211 miles south of Majuro, I took the helm and tried to steer through a major squall and discovered that our steering wasn’t working. After several attempts to fix it – including filling the hydraulic fluid – we finally decided that Wayne would have to go into the water to see what was going on with the rudder. He donned his snorkel and fins and tied a single rope around his slender waist.  You need to know that we were in seas about 10-12 feet high and with the strong trades, the boat was moving at over a knot and I was terrified that the stern that was bouncing up and down like 6 feet into the air and then slamming down onto the water was going to hit him in the head and kill him. I kept repeating to myself silently “Don’t make me pull in a body.”

It turned out that the rudder shaft had broken and we had a rudder that was still resting in the bottom of the skeg-hung boot, but it was no longer connected to the steering gear. We were no longer able to steer the boat, and we were sitting on the equator hundreds of miles from the nearest land.

The funny part of this was that we had spent a good part of the early part of the passage complaining about the lousy ability of the RayMarine autopilot to steer the boat. Now, the autopilot was useless, and we had to figure out some way to steer this huge 52-foot steel boat. Wayne climbed out of the water and we talked it through and he came up with the idea of tying ropes around the rudder.  The difficult part was that this required him to go back into the water with his mask and snorkel twice more, and do what we came to call “rudder wrangling” as he dove down on this bucking bronco of a boat and managed to get not one but four ropes tied around the rudder – two for each side. He said he felt like Gollum from Lord of the Rings clinging to the rudder as the elevator rode and fell up to 12 feet at a tie.

I cannot convey to you the terror I felt at the idea of being left alone aboard this enormously complex piece of machinery. Yes, I’d been slowly learning how to sail her, but I wasn’t in any way ready to do it alone to transport an injured man to a hospital. I was so relived each time he made it back aboard merely bruised and not beaten.

We tested the new rudder system and made marks with Sharpie pens and we discovered that we were able to balance the rig so that the boat wanted to round up into the wind and the rudder was angled to fight against that pressure and Voila! we had steerage. Balance! Of course, every squall, every wind shift, every overly large wave sent the boat off on another course altogether. We didn’t have the ability of a helmsman to counteract these acts of nature. But we were amazed at our ability to balance the boat and make her sail on her own with a lashed rudder for hours. It certainly makes you think differently about your autopilot.

So, last night we hove to off the western end of Majuro and caught some ZZZ’s and this morning we made our final attempt to get to the pass into this atoll. And what else? Some sort of thing — bigger than just a squall — some ITCZ (Intertopical Convergence Zone) beast reared his head and blasted us with 40-50 knot winds on the nose as we tried to tack our way up to the pass. I have to admit in all my sailing, I have never been on a boat that sails through weather like that. We had already blown out one headsail, and now we were carrying the bullet-proof 90% heavy weather jib and the main with 2 reefs and with spindrift flying off the tops of the breaking waves, heeled over at 35-40 degrees, we kept beating our way to weather and the boat took it. With the rudder lashed we had little to no control. I kept thinking that if she rounds up and goes into irons and tacks over, we will experience a knock down. But it didn’t happen. The boat was balanced and she sailed us through every gust and every equally dangerous lull. In these last three weeks, I’ve grown to love the strength of this boat.

As often happens after a major blow, the sea goes quiet. When we were about 10 miles out, we lost the wind entirely. Up to that point, we had used the opposing forces of wind in sails and rudder to balance the boat. Suddenly, we had to learn how to center the rudder and use the motor with our jury-rigged rudder set-up. With very little practice, we had to find this new balance. We had arranged for Wayne’s friend to come out and tow us through the pass, but in the lull following the blow, we decided we didn’t need help. We made our own way through the pass into the atoll lagoon. I was at the helm and Wayne was on the stern of the boat tweaking the lines that led to the rudder. I worked amazingly well. In fact, we crossed the rest of the lagoon with one or the other of us going back and pulling on this line or that, and we motored right up to the mooring ball in the lagoon. A friend caught the line I tossed to him and he threaded it through the mooring pendant. I don’t know if there is any way I can convey to you the satisfaction we felt at having done this all on our own — and even more important, we had fun doing it.

So, tonight as I sit in this overload atmosphere of noise and music and loud voices, I keep thinking about how autopilots can be great, but they can also be the antithesis of what I want from life. I’ve been oversteering my life for quite a long time. I’ve been trying to force plans and destinations onto my life when in fact, I should have been embracing the randomness of it all. Losing your rudder, breaking the autopilot can sometimes be the best thing that happens to you. It teaches you that you can find a natural balance. It’s there just waiting be discovered.  If you are brave enough to let go of the autopilot. If you are brave enough to take a risk on a rudderless life, you have no idea what riches or joy you might find. I can attest to the fact that you just might find love. Like I have.

Fair winds!

Christine

 

 

 

 

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It’s cold and flu season…

C.E. Grundler

And I’m researching that firsthand, as in a 101 fever, a splitting headache, every joint in my body aches… hell, my BONES hurt. Normally, my bones do their job with no complaints, but not today. Coughing, though oddly, no other congestion, which is one saving grace. And overwhelming exhaustion. I didn’t know it was possible to be this tired and remain conscious — though not for long.

My laptop battery is down to 16% and not only do I not know where the cord is, I don’t care. I turn it on to check my email, then off it goes. But not to worry, my throbbing brain is still working away. All this pain and misery will find its way onto the pages eventually. And I’m catching up on some long over-due research — I’m finally sitting down in one spot long enough to marathon Dexter on Netflix, from season 1 till I run out of episodes. And nothing cheers me up like a whole lot of blood spatter.

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Ideas come like the rabbit pulled from the hat . . .

www.michaelhaskins.net

It has to be one of the most asked question of writers: Where do you get your ideas? I think most of us have a stock answer for when we’re at a party, or saloon. I usually say, “From reading the newspaper.” It’s true, but it’s not the only way story ideas form.

Of course, sometimes I lie and tell people it’s magic, like pulling the rabbit from the magician’s top hat. I wish it were magic. Though, I’m often surprised when an idea forms and wonder myself where it came from.

A couple of weeks ago I sat at the Smokin’ Tuna Saloon with a friend, Reef Perkins, who published his biography and recently a short story collection, “Screwed, Blu’d and Tattooed.”

I have encouraged Reef to write fiction. Reef is a Key West character. A veteran from the Army’s Mekong Delta patrol boats during the Vietnam War and later as a salver and drug smuggler, and a guest of the government for a year or two. He has stories to tell.

Reef told me, “I don’t have an idea  what I’ll write next or if I’ll write anything.”

He didn’t know what to write about and asked me how I kept coming up with story lines. I gave him my old standby about newspapers and looking for those short quirky pieces. We kept talking and I mentioned music.

“Reef, I just jotted down a story idea yesterday afternoon,” I told him. “I was driving home and listening to Waylon Jennings sing about warning someone to get out of Tulsa before the sunset.”

No, I am not going to write about Tulsa. The song is about a pregnant woman and her no-good boyfriend who’s still out partying. It got me to thinking, what would Mick Murphy do if a female friend he was close to had a bad relationship, got pregnant and then died from a beating by the no-good boyfriend. Baby dies too!

I got this all from a three-minute song. I believe good songs are a novel cut down to the essentials.

Let me tell you, once that idea settled in, my mind took off on a trip that would put LSD to shame. I have taken it and added a meth lab, strip club manager, Panama City, Florida, New Orleans . . . I don’t see an end in sight as Mick Murphy goes in search of this scumbag and brings justice for the dead.

I hope I got Reef to think about music and newspapers and what he hears people say in saloons. Down here, they say some weird things. Ad “what if” to some of the things we hear, in a song or saloon or read about and you’re off and going. At least I am.

Where do your story ideas come from?

To keep up with the inaugural Mystery Writers Key West Fest, please go to, www.mysterywriterskeywestfest.com  Lot of info there and more updates to come.

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Life on the dock

By Mike Jastrzebski

To be honest I would rather be swinging at anchor than living at a dock, but sometimes it’s just not practical. If you’re still working, having running water, shore power, and a place to keep a car make life easier.

Same thing goes for working on a boat and getting it ready for the next cruise. I can’t even count how many trips I’ve made in the past month to Home Depot and West Marine while I was installing our new water maker. And it’s nice to have neighbors if you need an extra hand or just want to sit on a dock box and shoot the shit.

I’ll be the first to admit that I have some anti-social tendencies. I’m not big on parties or groups of strangers, but an occasional pot luck is all right. Still, I prefer to get together with a few friends, maybe knock back a beer, and chat.

Sometimes we’ll chat about boats or solar panels or water makers, and sometimes it’s about so and so down at the end of the dock who keeps talking about heading over to the Bahamas but can’t quite seem to shake the boat loose from the dock lines.

And sometimes we talk about having the boat hauled, which is really what this whole diatribe is about. You see, as much as I love living on the hook, I hate living on the hard, and that’s just what we’re planning to do at the end of the month.

I’m not 100 percent sure but I’m afraid we’re going to have to have the bottom peeled. Two years ago I had some blistering and there were a couple of good size blisters I put off repairing. Now I fear it’s time to pay the piper, especially since I’m going to put CopperCoat on the bottom. CopperCoat is a 10-15 year bottom coat and I want to prepare the bottom properly before putting it on.

I spoke to a local expert who has peeled several friends’ boats and he will be coming out to look at the boat before I make a final decision. But I have this feeling in the pit of my stomach and my head keeps telling me to pay the money and do the bottom right, after all, this is our home.

Actually it’s not the cost that’s upsetting my stomach as much as the thought of spending 2-3 months on the hard waiting for the peeled bottom to completely dry. Did I mention that in my mind the absolute least favorite thing about living on a boat is living on the hard. But then again, how can a person really appreciate the feel of the wind in the sails, or the contentment of being anchored behind a small island, or the beautiful sunrises and sunsets that are accentuated by the surrounding ocean if he isn’t willing to endure a little hardship?

Did I mention I hate living on the hard? (Oh! So does Mary!!!)

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Sailing Unplugged

by Christine Kling

It is Friday afternoon and I’m trying to gather together my rather disjointed thoughts as to what it’s been like to sail along at 4-5 knots now on a broad reach traveling ever northwards through velvety 12-15 knot trade winds on Learnativity, this 52-foot steel motorsailor. In spite of her heavy design, I’ve been surprised at how well she sails. The boat has this great easy motion and she coddles her crew behind the hardtop dodger with the easily-dropped side curtains all around. When she gets moving, her weight blasts through waves like a little mini-destroyer, but when the wind builds, she still heels over like a swooning schoolgirl. She’s rigged with in-boom furling for the main with an electric winch and a humongous single Harken 65 electric winch for bringing in the headsail.

We left the anchorage off the island of Navadra 13 days ago, and that was the last time I was able to really access the Internet. I’ve been unplugged for almost two weeks now, and I must admit that I’ve been left with an odd disoriented feeling as a result. I’m like an addict cut off from my supplier. Yes, we stopped at the island of Rotuma for a couple of days, but I was only able to get a thin connection via my tethered iPhone to send a single email to my friend Barbara who is posting these blogs for me. I don’t even know if she got the email or if the blog was posted. Tonight, I’ll try to send this post via the satellite phone connection and again, I can only hope it will travel up into space, bounce off a satellite and then go three quarters of the way around the world in mere minutes to arrive in her inbox.

Think about that for a minute. Here I am out here sailing in the wake of Captain Cook and the great Polynesian and Micronesian navigators, moving at the same speed through the same ocean, yet I can send an email via satellite. I’m a human like those who came before me, but the advent/invent of airplanes, computers, the world wide web, etc. has totally changed how most people relate to each other.

This sailing life leaves one so much time to contemplate the vastness of this blue marble we live on, and all the ways in which speed, time, distance, and technology influence how we see ourselves and our place on the planet’s surface. Sailboats move along at the pace of the pre-industrial world, the pace one human can run. Right now we are located about one degree south of the equator, and I expect we’ll cross over that imaginary line sometime tomorrow afternoon. But who knows for sure. Stuff happens when you’re sailing, and you just have to go with it. While this boat does carry enough fuel to motor all the way to Majuro, I’m certainly glad that’s not something we are doing. For the most part, we’re sailing it.  There have been afternoons when we’ve been becalmed between squalls, the boat spinning without steerage, rolling and sails flapping. The ETA for our arrival as displayed on my iPad then changes from some time next week to some date in March. But then all of a sudden, you’ll feel the first little cat’s paws tickling the back of your neck, and the headsail fills for a moment before the swell rolls the wind out of it. Slowly, the wind builds and the helm starts to respond and mere minutes later, the boat is charging off again like a horse with the bitt in her teeth. Suddenly, 7 knots feels like breakneck speed.

Our plugged-in lives have made daily conversations with people all around this wide world so commonplace. Back in the shoreside life, we think nothing of firing off emails to the UK or New Zealand or even to strangers in Fiji. But try sailing that same distance, and I guarantee that you be filled with awe at the notion of this virtual world wide web spread across our planet that reduces vast distances to mere seconds of time.

This is the longest time I have been disconnected from the web since I’ve been a published author. I’ve been working on the outline for a new Seychelle novel, and I’m astonished at how my brain has changed. I’m finding that I can no longer think effectively without my Internet connection. It’s as though Google has become permanently attached to my brain as an external data source, and I can’t function without it. I manage about three thoughts before my fingers start itching to look something up on the web. If I’ve changed this much in 15 years, what will happen to human evolution? I’m thinking about the movie The Matrix in a whole new way these days.

I’m also no longer attached to my tribe, my friends, my writing community. With the web, when I think of something funny or interesting, I can send it out into the ether and soon comments are coming back from around the world in response to my random thought. I thrive on that interaction. I hadn’t realized how much my social life was intertwined with this computer portal into so many conversations be they on blogs, forums, email list serves, Facebook or Twitter. I miss that connectedness, but I also see how much I have come to rely on it in lieu of real human face to face interaction. Yes, there is lots of thought in those conversations, but there is not much emotion. The web has allowed me to become the solitary hermit I’ve been in recent years. I’m enjoying the long conversations Wayne and I are having, and I’m relearning the skill of looking a real person straight in the eyes.

With this opportunity to step back from the virtual life comes the chance to re-evaluate my own relationship to the web. I wasn’t sure I’d survive without my Internet fix, but I’m starting to think this unplugging business is healthy. My brain is stretching and learning to work off its own memory banks again, and I’m seeing the world through fresh eyes, free of screen burn.  In fact, I think I could get used to unplugging like this more often.

So, Wayne, where to next?

Fair winds!

Christine

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The Eagle has Landed…

 

C.E. Grundler

It’s that time of year again. I saw one flying by as I rounded the corner this morning, and now there’s another perched on a tree next to the travel lift. It’s January, ice flows clog the river, and the eagles have returned to the Hudson Valley. If it’s anything like last year, soon there will be seals lounging on the vacant docks.

In the last week I’ve watched the temperature swing from the mid-60s down to sub-zero, and now it’s on it’s way back up. By Saturday it’s going to be pushing 50 again. I can’t even venture what the thermometer will read in a month, but either way, I’ll be jumping in the Hudson with an ever-growing crowd in the Stony Point Polar Plunge. Why? For a good cause. And because, why not?

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JetBlue Blues

by John Urban

Few disappointments are worse than sadness triggered by the hand of a trusted friend. Such was my recent experience with JetBlue Airlines. No, this wasn’t one of the storm-related problems that plagued travelers and carriers alike, this was a mechanical problem that, by their own admission, lies squarely at the feet of the airline.

It’s hard for me to complain about JetBlue. They’ve been my trusted means for getting to Florida, the land of escapism. And readers of this blog know that escapism is long sought. The JetBlue ads about the Sunshine State, the tie-in with Spring training, the fact that the entire crew works to clean the cabin – I’ve bought into it all.

I’ve had other favorable ties to airlines. I can remember scores of trips on the Eastern Shuttle back when you could jump on the hourly departing plane at the very last moment, grab a seat, and fly. In the earliest days on Eastern you didn’t even need a ticket to board because the attendants took a credit card swipe right in the aisle.

And then there was Chalks Airline that flew Grumman seaplanes between Florida and the Bahamas. I consider myself lucky that I had the chance to get a few rides on Chalks, putting down in Lauderdale, Government Cut in Miami, and Bimini. JetBlue has been fun, but Chalks was the ultimate in commercial flight escapism.

It’s funny how all that good karma can slip away. All it takes is a Sunday morning 5AM arrival at Boston Logan with email news that our 6AM flight to Orlando was cancelled due to mechanical problems. The next available option for me, my wife, kids, and mother-in-law was 4:30 PM that day. Crap happens as they say, but I still don’t understand why JetBlue’s Bill of Rights says that customers are reimbursed a free flight if their plane is delayed six hours, but nothing like that if the flight is cancelled and you get an even longer delay. Well, rather than complain, I try to take the advice of a friend who says that the best remedy is to vote with your feet.

And in any case, I still have those fond memories of Eastern and Chalks, and Florida still awaits. Who knows, maybe these travel blues will land in my next book. After all, they made it to the blog, didn’t they.

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The new water maker

I reported recently that we bought a water maker from Cruise RO water and power and I’m happy to say that it’s now completely installed. Prior to buying the unit I had researched water makers online and talked with a friend who owned one of their water makers and spoke very highly about it. After discovering that Cruise RO was going to have someone demonstrating one of their units at the SSCA Melbourne Gam, I called the company and spoke to the president of the company, Richard Boren, and asked if they would have any specials at the Gam.

Rich explained that they would be offering a free consumables kit that consisted of a years worth of filters, pickling agent, and hi-pressure pump oil, a $135.00 value. Rich also told me that during the Gam he offered the demo unit for sale with no shipping charges. Since shipping the unit from California would cost nearly $200.00, it seemed like the time to buy so I pre-purchased the Gam demo unit.

What I bought was their SeaMaker SM20 unit. This water maker makes 20 gallons of RO water an hour and is made to run off a Honda 200o generator. The cost of the unit was $4195.00.

The installation was a bear, not because of the Cruise RO Water Maker, but because all 20 GPH water makers are big and take up a lot of room. The high pressure water pump weighs 53 pounds and the single RO membrane assembly is 40″ long. But in reality it was after I found room for the water maker parts that the hard work began. Running the hoses and wiring for the unit was time consuming and like most jobs on a boat involved contorting my 64 year old body into positions meant for younger souls.

Throughout the installation Rich has been very helpful. When I bought the unit Rich told me more than once to call him if I had any questions–and I have called him several times. He answers his phone promptly and the one time he didn’t answer he called me back within half an hour.

So how does the water maker run? I’m afraid that you’ll have to wait a little while for the answer to that question. Although Rich has assured me that I can make water here in the marina, he has also emphasized that fuel or oil in the water can shorten the life of the membrane. So rather than take a chance I figured I’d wait until we get out of the marina before testing it.

This should happen at the end of the month. Since Harbortown Marina does not allow living aboard while the boat is being worked on in the yard, we’re taking Rough Draft up to Titusville to do a bottom job. The plan is to spend one or two nights at the city mooring field before having the boat hauled, and we’ll test the water maker while we’re in the mooring field. I’ll comment on the test results then.

 

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