The Great Wander

There is still a lot about the summer that I want to share with you.  Traveling through the national parks in the west was truly awe inspiring and as I look back now, I want to go back through more of the parks and spend more time at some of the parks.  Like I said before, it was hard with the dogs, since there were a lot of places they couldn’t go.  But we are here now, and I can’t go back and change it, so we move forward.  I have had several people ask, “What are you doing?  Where are you?  What’s going on?”

Here’s what’s up.  We are still working on the electrical system.  We have a lot of the old wire pulled and are waiting on new parts, specifically the breaker panel.  This week marks six weeks since we ordered it, so hopefully it will be here this week.  Of course, there are still supply chain issues going on since the pandemic, and we are now at the mercy of the lack of materials.  Hopefully this week, it’ll be here.

Since we had to rip out most of the wiring anyway, we are doing some upgrades to the electrical.  We have decided to add some solar panels, we’ve about doubled the amp hours on our house battery bank, and we obviously had to get all new navigation electronics.  We are excited about that.  Even our new panel will be an upgrade with more breaker spots and digital gauges for the water tanks and the voltmeters. Exciting stuff.

So, what do we do while we are waiting for electrical parts to come.  Well, we clean, we have other boat projects going on, we evaluated other components that we think need to be upgraded.  We’ve started to take more advantage of the around us. 

The biggest major project we are currently undertaking is the aft bulkhead.  Water over the years has been running between the doors and the aft bulkhead, not good.  I think it’s a common problem in this vintage of Lagoon, but I’m not sure.  What that means for us is that we discovered that the portion of the bulkhead underneath our doors was completed rotted.  I could push my finger through it, so we ripped out the rotten section and have cut a new piece to replace that.

We are sealing it, since we know that there’s a good likelihood of water getting into there again, we haven’t exactly figured out where it’s coming from, but we are going to look at other ways to abate the water issue once everything is put back together.  We did cut into the core of the bridge deck (the piece that connects the two hulls on a catamaran) and found that it was not damaged.  We felt very luck with that.  Check out Sailing Nahoa if you want to see how that could’ve gone for us.

I also, when there’s down time have been reviewing the paper charts that we bought so that I know what to expect as we get out of here.  There are going to be some interesting components of the journey out of here and if the seas aren’t more than about 1 meter, we will probably sail south outside the ICW (Intra Coastal Waterway), if they are bigger, then we will stay on the ICW.  We also need to find a place to do a short haul out to inspect the hull after the lightning strike and take care of a couple of things that we should’ve done earlier.

In short, even though we are stuck here.  And we are stuck at the moment, we are still keeping busy.  Keeping crew morale up is hard to do, but we are trying to find things to help with that, like going to the movies, or even going for a walk.  Things are hard, but then at the same time I feel incredibly lucky.