Last Thursday Jennifer and I were down on Las Olas Blvd in Fort Lauderdale having an enjoyable patio dinner when my phone rang. “James, this is Suzanne Speight, Public Affairs Specialist with Navy Region Southeast. I have one position available to embark on the the USS California.” That sounded pretty good. I’ve never been on…
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Fleet Week Port Everglades
This weekend we attended Fleet Week Port Everglades as a guest of Mike Chan, Protocol Officer with Navy Region Southeast, who was organizing the event. We arrived shortly before the Legion of Honor Ceremony on board the USS Bataan, where the Consulate General of France, Philippe Létrilliart, awarded nine American veterans with the Legion of…
Boat Projects
Soverel Harbour Marina has been an excellent stop to replenish our boat spares and supplies, address Jennifer’s shoulder injury, and just relax and enjoy a slower pace. While here, we’ve also completed a ton of boat projects, ranging from battery replacement to canvas work to automation systems. Below are the majority of the projects we’ve…
Balancing alternator outputs
In our charging configuration, we parallel the house and start alternators to charge the house battery bank. Each alternator has its own individual Balmar Max Charge MC-624 regulator and we’ve been asked a few times if we balance the outputs using a product such as the Balmar Centerfielder. This is one of those issues where…
Metal Shark Aluminum Boats
Jeanerette, Louisiana isn’t a massive metropolis, so why were us boaters and technology lovers excited to spend a day there? Admittedly the oysters, crawfish, and local beer are all excellent, but that wasn’t the motivation behind the trip. The reason was to visit Metal Shark Aluminum Boats. If you have ever been just a bit…
Soverel Harbour Marina
We’ve spent the month since arriving in Palm Beach at Soverel Harbour Marina in Palm Beach Gardens. We selected this marina mainly because they had space for us on short notice–most of the others we’d been recommended were full up. Now that we’ve been here a while, Soverel Harbour has turned out to be an…
Fuel bugs
As we describe in Dirona fuel manifold, we choose to explicitly pump fuel from the appropriate bulk tank to the supply tank rather than gravity feed. This is a slightly more manual operating mode but has some advantages that we really like. The first advantage is that a leak in the supply system can put…
Johnny Sessa Bulldozing Visit
What beats an afternoon operating heavy equipment? Months before we made it to Florida, Oliver Sessa offered us a day at Johnny Sessa Bulldozing with an open invitation to give some of their larger equipment a whirl. James has been looking forward to it since. Within a week of our arriving in Florida, Oliver emailed…
St. Lucia to Palm Beach
Last week we ran 1,424 miles directly from St. Lucia to Palm Beach, Florida. We initially were planning to work our way up slowly through the Caribbean and reach Florida via the Bahamas, but Jennifer developed complications with her broken collarbone, so we went straight to Florida to seek medical attention. We had some boat…
Pigeon Island
We took a taxi from the Rodney Bay marina to explore Pigeon Island National Landmark. The island once was detached from the mainland until a causeway was built in 1973, and has a lengthy naval history: it was a pirate’s hideout in the 1500s, a British naval base starting in the 1700s, and a US…
