Day 30, Year 7: Happy Birthday to Jed and Phil
Date: Thursday, December 8, 2011
Weather: Sunny, Windy Day with Extremely Low Tide, High Temp 40’s
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, N Falmouth, Massachusetts
Today was our son-in-law Jed’s 40th birthday. And we know he had a happy one. Heather gave him a Kindle and we kept the kids tonight so Heather and Jed could have dinner with good friends. It is the first time since Sam was born that they have been able to get together for a dinner date with friends. That’s what kids do to you! And a very happy birthday to Phil Hunt across the pond in England. Phil is Jo’s (our daughter-in-law) father and he celebrated his 65th today.
We celebrated our day on Windbird with a few fireworks as Mark worked on the electrical system. He is still trying to undo wiring that was done in Thailand to hook us up to a 220-volt system and for some reason the wires are an absolute maze. Just when he thought he had it figured out and working, I smelled that awful electrical wire smoldering smell coming from the engine room. Just as we got that taken care of, Randy who has been working on our reverse-cycle heater-air conditioner arrived with the parts to finally get at least the heater side of things working. So we have unplugged the oil-filled electric heater and are now using the reverse-cycle heater. This will work until the outside water temperature reaches freezing. Then we will have to go back to the electric heaters. And we know the reverse-cycle has a Freon leak. We just don’t know where. So it might not last all that long. We’ll just have to see.
I picked up Sam and Jonah and brought them to boat today. They haven’t been on Windbird for afternoon naps since we moved here, so it was fun to have them aboard. While I was reading a pre-nap story to them, Mark was continuing to work on the electrical system. All of a sudden we saw sparks and I had to yell up to Mark on deck. It probably scared the kids to death, but they both handled it without panic. Mark had all sorts of equipment out for checking the wiring system, and all Sam had to say was, “You guys are real professionals.” I had to laugh. He didn’t mean it in a sarcastic way, but at that moment, I felt like we are anything but professional with our electrical work. But we’ll keep plugging away at this and either run new wiring and by-pass all the old or remove it if we can trace its path.
It was too windy today to go up the mast to put up more Bird-B-Gone spikes and it was definitely too windy to get the boat covered. We are hoping that both can be done tomorrow. The weather forecast is for sunny weather with temps in the low 50’s and very little wind. Sounds perfect for a boat covering day.
