Cruising to Nowhere

Life has really slowed down...

We spend our time working on boat projects and walking around town like all the other old-timers. Sue got so bored, she actually took up running again.

Meanwhile, my latest project on the boat has, predictably, turned into another surprise nightmare. I had the brilliant idea to upgrade our battery charger with a new charger/inverter. When I started to work on the A/C side of the circuits, it came to my attention that the entire original A/C wiring had been done improperly, black is white and vice-versa. To make matters worse, when I started to try and correct the situation, some of the existing cables started to crumble to dust in my hands. Apparently perfectly supple rubber insulation can turn into a kind of brittle hard plastic after 30 years (strangely not all of it though). To make a long story short, 3 long days of labour have brought me basically back to where I started. Just another typical chapter in the saga of boat ownership.

With fall arriving soon, the harbour is looking very empty - lots of room for visiting yachts now.

Most of the time it is very quiet and peaceful there, a nice place to sit and have a designer coffee.

But fall also brings the cruise ships. So far we have seen a couple of big ships (one from Princess and one from Celebrity) anchored out at the mouth of the harbour, with people being ferried in via their tenders.

There was also a small cruise ship the was able to use the large dock at the inner harbour. We noticed that while they roll out the red carpet for the biggies, no-one takes much notice of the smaller boats. Not sure which would be better, from the point of view of the cruisers.

So far, the weather has been holding up well; very nice for September in Nanaimo (nothing like as warm as it apparently got back in Edmonton). But now the predictions are for more normal fall conditions - a little cooler and some sporadic rain showers.

So maybe it is time for us to start thinking about what we want to do for the next few months before we find ourselves cruising to nowhere...