Day 273, Year 7: Grandkids, Laundry, Holding Tanks, and Batteries
Date: Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Weather: Mostly Sunny
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
Now there’s an interesting combination–grandkids, laundry, holding
tanks, and batteries. But those were the things our day revolved around. Sam, Jonah, and
Oliver went with their mommy and daddy to a local pond this morning and
truly enjoyed the time. The pond is much calmer than the ocean and there is
shade along the shore. Oliver enjoyed the shade while Sam and Jonah both
tried snorkeling. Jonah enjoyed it but Sam loved it. He snorkeled for a
long time using his backpack floating device and then took that off and just
swam and snorkeled. He has wanted to do this for such a long time, but
somehow the waves in the ocean make it a much scarier proposition. Now that
he has done it in a pond, we might be able to encourage him to do it along
the shore of a calm anchorage. Jonah is younger and just needs more time.
But both came to Woods Hole after their pond excursion and were exuberant
about their experience. When Mark I went to shore to pick them up they were
wearing their sarongs and looked absolutely adorable. And speaking of
adorable, Margaret (Jo’s mom) send us photos of Ziggy and Coco today and
they were also absolutely adorable. Love those grandkids!
I spent my morning going to the town dock to fill up water jugs and do sheet
and towel laundry. After our overnight to Tarpaulin Cove, I had an
abundance of towels and sheets that needed to be washed. And while I did
this, Mark delved into the holding tank. It seems that no matter what we
do, when we are using the holding tank we have a nasty odor. We now have
all new heads and new hoses, so that is not the problem. Mark actually
opened the top of the holding tank today and it looked better than we had
expected and is also not so stinky. So now we need to check to vent and the
vent filter. But in the process, we have read a lot of suggestions on
keeping a sweet smelling holding tank and we will try some of those. One is
always flushing the holding tank with fresh water after a pump out and then
putting in a super dose of Calgon water softener and some liquid Tide. We
have been using KO and that was another recommendation, but it hasn’t done
the job for us. So now we’ll try the Tide and Calgon regimen and see what
happens.
Mark ended his day by checking the charge on our AGM batteries. We have had
to charge the batteries twice a day recently as they just aren’t holding a
charge. We went to West Marine at closing time to borrow their device to
check the batteries and came right home to do the job. We’ll return the
device before opening in the morning, but in the meantime we found that the
batteries are in better shape than we thought-not great, just better. More
has to be done on this front, but we are making progress.
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| 120807 Day 273 Cape Cod, USA–Grandkids |
