No travel.
Clark reserved two nights at the Gulfport Municipal Marina to guarantee that we would receive our "snail" mail that we had forwarded here. As it turned out, it arrived yesterday, so no worries on that front. We took advantage of the extra day to take care of miscellaneous chores. I dusted, vacuumed and did laundry.
While I did those chores, Clark worked on his display units. The boat has three chart plotter displays - one on the upper helm and two in the pilot house. Clark decided to put the newly repaired unit in the upper helm and install the blue pads that the repair person had sold him for the other two units to be used in the pilot house. That meant that he had to uninstall all three units, work on them, and then put them back in their new locations of choice. He basically did a "shift left" of the units as each one moved over one slot from its original position on the boat.
In the picture below, the blue pads are used to conduct heat away from the coil to prevent it overheating. The coil shown below is the bad one returned to us by the repairman.
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| Coil generates high voltage to operate the back light; The blue pads conduct heat away from the coil. |
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| Blue pads installed - attached to coil. |
With three units involved, the install-and-configure activity turned into an almost-all-day event. Even so, Clark did manage to capture a few photos during the course of the day.
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| Friendly bird by the marina office |
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| He hung around all day long |
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| Highly-decorated, "disco" , pelican by marina office |
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| Fish statue near marina office |
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| Mural-painted support posts at marina |
We could throw a stone from our boat and hit the fuel dock across the water from us. Unfortunately, we can't walk on water. Instead, we have a very long walk from our dock all the way around the marina to get to the marina office, restrooms, and laundry.
Since we were here in 2015, the marina has been upgraded significantly and added new restrooms and a captain's lounge. The facility is very nice with two exceptions. First, for security purposes, a key is required to get onto our dock. Okay, that is good. What is bad is that a key is required to get off the dock. That seems to me to be a nasty fire hazard. What if a fire broke out in one of the boats, we could not get off the dock without a key. As if that is not bad enough, we got one key for the two of us. With the long hike to the restroom, we have to go together, or one person is stuck on board until the other comes back.
The second, not-so-favorable thing about this marina is the cost of doing laundry. I have been paying about $1.50 per wash elsewhere. Here the price is $2.25 per load, and the washer capacities are relatively small. Even so, the wash price is not totally outside the range of acceptable charges. What is crazy here is the charge of $0.25 for 5 minutes of dry time on the dryer. I wiped out a roll of quarters on two loads of laundry. Even a dock hand who works at this marina thinks the dryer charge is outrageous. He told me that one of the regular tenants hangs her laundry from her boat for all to see in rebellion against the dryer charges.
Besides working on display units and taking pictures, Clark filled our water tanks to make the boat ready to anchor out on our trip to Marathon. Hopefully, the weather will be warm enough that we won't feel the need to run to a marina for electricity, i.e. heat.
At the end of the day, we got a visit from the Gulfport AGLCA harbor hosts. They brought a bottle of wine to share, and I provided cheese and crackers for a mini docktails. Having been in Gulfport previously, the three of us mostly talked about boat travel in Canada and the Bahamas. We shared our blog URL so they can read about our explorations over the years.
With all the activity today, I found myself quite impressed with Clark's ability to capture an amazing picture of the evening sky with a beautiful reflection of the sky and sailboats at the marina.
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| Reflections of a cloudy night at Gulfport Municipal Marina. |
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