Sunday May 24: Doesn't Take Much

I'm really just not a hard person to please. Give me a car with XM radio and Willie's Roadhouse and I could just live in the car :-) Newer cars often have XM for free - lucked out this time :-)

So we turned in our one way rental (pricey to drop cars normally) in exchange for one from a local Enterprise which we'll have for the next couple of days yet as we work to get Guppy cleaned up and ready to travel. No problem with the non-working EZpass - happens all of the time? Then why don't you fix it .... but I will definitely keep an eye on the credit card bill.

First thing (after breakfast of course at the Red Onion) Saturday we had time to drive by Pirate's Cove to see how Guppy faired.

Couldn't find the boat!!! Only until we returned later and asked Paul where the boat was did we realize that we actually drove past it twice. Totally covered and under the shed. When we left we didn't know if we would be back in 8 months or 20 months - depending on if we decided to do the loop again in Yesterday's Dream. Opted not to loop again (this year at least) but Paul made sure Guppy was totally covered and well tied for the 20 month option!

First order was to remove the tarp and get the boat uncovered. We were very happy with the good condition the inside (and outside) was in.

Way different than how the trawler fares in Florida.

Give us this northern storage anytime :-)  Of course that's only because it's so cold you couldn't even be ON a boat in New York for the winter.

No problem - we'll exchange a few days of clean up for the great weather for the 7 months of living on the trawler.

The insides were more messy than usual as we had removed all of the cushion covers so new could be made (major project for while we were in Banana Bay this year).

Couldn't wait to see how things fit. What a chore to get the covers on!!




Steve did a great job with the folding, stuffing and squeezing needed to put the new cushions covers over the old foam.

Overall? Quite happy with the results - especially given I was working with very old covers as a pattern. Some of the cushions still need the foam adjusted but that will come after they've been sat on a bit.

While the boat is out of the water, we're adding a new depth finder, changing out the zincs (only for fresh water the anodes will be aluminum), paint the outdrive (job for Pirates's Cove) and waxing the sides (by Steve - assuming he has time to do this).

A new 1500 watt pure sine wave inverter will be added. This will allow the 110-volt fridge to run more effectively.

But there is still time for play, right? A road trip to the casino about 45 minutes away. It was a nice place. Smoking and non-smoking areas. But the place was packed! Could hardly find a slot machine open ....

We even resorted to trying the smoking side - that lasted all of 5 minutes. Couldn't take it an longer. Sad that so many folks are just smoking themselves to a short life or a longer than wanted life being unable to breathe.

Really cool, though? We walked in and said "There's a Chihuly!" Thanks to our stop in St. Petersburg, we were able to readily identify this as one of his chandeliers. This particular one would have cost about $700,000.

Good thing we didn't leave having lost $$ - hate to think that is where my money went :-)

Tomorrow: a well planned out day - starting with mounting the new windshield. We are always at our best in the morning and this installation is something we want to do right!!