Friday, 5/3/2019 – In anticipation of Cinco De Mayo, I insisted that my staff come with me to visit a nearby taco truck for lunch on Friday. It was FABULOUS!
Saturday, 5/4/2019 – Our big priorities for the weekend were heading to Annapolis Inflatables to inquire about getting our EPIRB serviced and checking out their inventory of used dinghies and working on getting the new chartplotter and radome installed.
Our trip to Annapolis Inflatables went pretty well. As expected, our 16+ year old EPIRB was in need of servicing, which would have cost $250+. The two personal EPIRB beacons that we found on the boat were also ancient and unserviceable. We elected to forego getting the boat’s EPIRB serviced, with plans to purchase a newer, smaller EPIRB (with a battery that’s good for 10 years) for only about $100 more than it would have cost to have our dinosaur serviced. Since we’re not going to be doing any significant traveling within the next few months, we put the EPIRB purchase on the back burner for now. BUT, we did find a new-to-us dinghy that we I kind of fell in love with! It’s a little older and has some “character,” but, for $1,100 bucks?! SOLD! Annapolis Inflatables said they’d give us a call once they had it serviced, washed and ready to go. We’re the proud owner’s of a new-to-us water car!
Sunday, 5/5/2019 – We woke up to a very rainy morning on the boat. We spent the morning hanging out, Josh working on his Divemaster studies and me, trying to catch up on outstanding e-mails, paying bills and working on blog posts. In pretty exciting news, we figured out that our boat HVAC unit has a dehumidifier setting which worked wonderfully for making the interior of the boat comfortable while being closed up due to the rain.
Saturday, 5/11/2019 – Sunday, 5/12/2019 – We packed up Friday after work and headed to the boat for the weekend for the annual family fishing trip with Rockaholic Fishing. We had been listening to the VHF radio for the past few weekends, eavesdropping on how the fishing around Kent Island was going. We had heard a lot of people talking about fishing, mostly that they weren’t catching a daggone thing. But, we were optimistic, and happy to spend some time out on the water. We headed out around lunchtime on Saturday, hopeful, but, by evening time, we had only caught one throw-it-back-in fish. The forecast for Sunday was miserable – cold, rainy and windy enough to produce a small craft advisory. We decided that being cold and wet for 5+ hours wasn’t really at the top of anyone’s agenda and cancelled the trip for Sunday. We spent the day at the boat, instead, and ended up with another list of Amazon purchases and more boat projects to complete.
Saturday, 5/18/2019 – Sunday, 5/19/2019 – For the first time in a while, we stayed at home for the weekend. Not really willingly, though. I had to go into work on Saturday for a few hours, so, we made the best of a boat-less weekend. Josh made arrangements to assist with confined water dives for two new divers in pursuit of their Open Water certifications in order to get some of his Divemaster requirements checked off his list.
Wednesday, 5/22/2019 – We finally got tje call that our dinghy was ready to be picked up and that Annapolis Inflatables had also found us a 15hp motor for the dinghy that was barely used for $1200. This was exactly the kind of deal we had been waiting for! Needless to say, we said yes to the motor and made arrangements to pick up both the dinghy and motor this coming weekend. Josh had another scuba classroom class in the evening, focused around the exciting topics of dive theory and dive tables.
Friday, 5/24/2019 – Monday, 5/27/2019 – We had a pretty productive boat work weekend! Josh took the day off work on Friday to head to Annapolis Inflatables to pick up our dinghy and motor. I was pretty jealous that I had to stay behind and work, but, it all worked out just fine. Josh enjoyed being a boat bum for the day and gathered everything we’d need to launch the dinghy on Saturday.
Saturday morning, we got up early and got busy on boat work projects. We recalibrated water tank sensors and activated and updated the Navionics chart card for chartplotter. After those two small successes, we unloaded dinghy and motor and took it for a short cruise.
I was anxious to do a bit of exploring via dinghy so I talked Josh into a bit longer of an adventure than he had initially planned on. All went well until the motor stalled and left us movementless in front of a much larger boat, headed our way pretty quickly. After some cussing and a bunch of attempts to restart the motor, Josh finally got it going and we got out of the big boat’s way before being mowed down. Needless to say, the motor needs some work. But, after we got back, we got the dinghy stored securely on the foredeck and motor hoisted into it’s resting place without incident.
Josh’s brother and best friend made the trek down to spend the holiday weekend on the boat so we recruited their help for the last of the big outstanding boat projects – replacing the radome, halfway up the mast. After a few hours of hoisting things up and down, the radome had been successfully replaced with no calls to 911 and no parts floating in the water. A pretty big victory, I’d say! We even got the new chartplotter to recognize the radar, which we weren’t quite sure was going to work. At this point, everything we’ve got on the boat, electronic wise, is functioning with the new chartplotter which is better than we expected, so we’re pretty pleased!
We spent much of the rest of the weekend at The Jetty and then nursing hangovers before heading home on Monday afternoon for a few hours of rest before heading back to work.
| EXTRA INCOME SOURCE | AMOUNT EARNED |
|---|---|
Small Living, Big Life 