Back in Brunswick Part 1

October 21, 2015 -  We are back in Wisconsin for a few days..  Mary's brother Gerry, passed away a few days ago and we drove from Brunswick, Georgia to Wisconsin for the funeral.

We are located way down at the end of the road

We arrived back here on August 21, 2015.  Brent and Susan had left a few hours before we arrived.  We probably passed each other on I-95 but never knew it.

That huge cameraman pulled in after we had left for WI 

We had a boat load (pun intended) of stuff in the car requiring some manual labor as in 4 trips with 2 dock carts before it was all aboard.  Getting it stowed was, well, is still going on.

It is stewing weather here, very hot and humid.  I was a little apprehensive when I first fired up the A/C units, but they responded with nice cool air thank goodness.

We spent the whole day and the following day organizing and trying to make sense of all that we had brought back.  We intended on doing a number of boat projects and purchased many of the parts etc. up in Wisconsin.

The dock carts next to the grill where I didn't burn the steaks

Sunday, after hours of sorting and organizing we took the car to Walmart about 6 miles away to load up on food and other sundry items.   Unloading all that took us several trips and multiple dock carts.  I dare say we can be considered experts in this sort of thing.  Available for consulting.  Not so much for doing the actual labor.  

As I was loading up the fly bridge refrigerator I noticed is cooling fan wasn't working.  Dang.  So I wired up a window fan and got it situated to blow air across the cooling fins.  That sufficed as a temporary solution but I'll have to order another fan.

The batteries were acting flaky with voltage fluctuations I've never seen before.  I had the solar panels and its charger off line while we were away so maybe that was causing some issues but I've taken to monitoring their voltage readings knowing I'll need to get back down there and probably check all the connections again.

We are right along side the railroad tracks

We hired divers who worked for over 4 hours cleaning the bottom.  They reported it was very encrusted with barnacles.  If we don't leave here in a few weeks I'll have to call them in again.

One of the pot luck dinners/cocktail parties at the club house

The marina sponsors cocktail parties every Monday, Wednesday and Friday with free beer and wine.  The attendees contribute snacks.  There are all kinds of people here.   Aussies, Canadian, Kiwis, a few English couples too.  And they are on all manner of adventures.  One couple, Warren and Monica who we met only briefly, left their boat here and flew to France to tend a country estate for a few months, basically house sitting.

We talked with Paul and Sue on a Great Harbor 37 and she I ended up walking together at night since she likes to take a nightly walk while Paul showers.  She's an older lady, a past marathoner too.  They have been living aboard for 13 years and have been staying Marsh Harbor, Bahamas every winter for those 13 years.  And there are a few who are circumnavigaters.  Round the world cruisers.

And Randy, who is a superb cook and Beth.  They are Canadians on a sailboat heading for destinations south as in Grenada etc.   And Rhonda, the Shark tooth lady I call her, who found a place to collect sharks teeth near here.  It's about 2-3 miles on a bike.

And there are others.  Kim and his wife Kerry Ann, Australians who have a 8 year old son, Keeli, with them.  Their other children are pretty much grown up.  "He was a, ah, surprise", Kerry said in that delightful Aussie accent.  

Ricardo, a mechanical engineer from Portugal.  And Gess (Jess) a Frenchman who is the captain of this huge catamaran next to us.  He lives in Polynesia.    And Bob and Nan who are on a Island Packet 38.  And Rich and Lynda who have been up through Alaska and down through the Panama canal.    

Dock 8 dock party with a band this time

One night we went out to eat with Randy and Beth.  They are on dock 8, the party dock.  We stopped over there for a drink and then headed out to the Thai place here in town, Basil's.  It's about a mile walk from our dock.  Wow was it good!  I dare say it was better than Randy's curry chicken which he made for one of the dock parties earlier.  I opted for his recommendation of a 7 on the heat scale.  Next time we go I'm in for a 9.  We stopped for a night cap at one of the bars downtown before walking back to the boats.

Out with Randy and Beth

The Marina where we are staying, Brunswick Landing Marina, is situated right across from the old town area of Brunswick.  Brunswick is a somewhat depressed area.  The downtown area is on a sort of boulevard that runs for about 5 blocks.   And its old, with many of the buildings from a interesting architectural period, around the early 1900's.   But a majority of the buildings are vacant.  There a few shops and galleries and some restaurants, the Thai place being one.  The other is Fox's Pizza, a really good pizza place, and then a few bars and of course Subway.  And some art galleries, one of which our friend Susan uses as her studio.

Temporary Pumping station at one of the County Administration buildings

Across the street, just east of us are the Glynn County administration grounds.  The county detention center, a rather nice modern building with no windows, is also right there.  The administrative  buildings have portable generators running water pumps from what I can tell.  Or maybe they are sewage lift pumps?  But whichever, it pretty much portrays some crumbling infrastructure.

Brunswick downtown at night

More Brunswick downtown at night

Beyond that though the neighborhood deteriorates into a pretty depressed area.  Many of the homes here are just trashed up.  And not a few are vacant.  It's a poor area with a startlingly high crime rate.

The Marina is a few miles south of  Coastal College of Georgia.  The closet shopping area is the Lanier Plaza Shopping Center which lies about 1.5 miles directly east of the marina.  But directly east  is a questionable neighborhood with a reportedly the high crime rate.  In other words, one must ride through it to get to the stores.

Sue my walking partner warned us not to ride to the Winn Dixie.  The store is in the Lanier Shopping Center along with a Dollar Tree and a West Marine.   But I've ridden there many times now, right up "I" street which is right in front of the marina.  Never had any issues.  I've met some good people, some interesting people and a few wholly stoned guys.  The streets are dirty, many houses are crumbling, even those surrounding the county administrative grounds. 

When we first returned Mary needed a prescription so I walked the few miles to the CVS which is right in the middle of the not so nice neighborhood.  But everyone was quite pleasant and I never felt unsafe.  The general consensus here at the marina is just don't walk around beyond main street after dark.

The urban gardener

I ran into a women on MJK blvd. who had converted a vacant lot into an urban vegetable garden.  I've forgotten her name.  Hey, it was four words long and I have trouble remembering three letter names!  Her intent is to pass along some gardening tips to those in the neighborhood with the hopes of seeing others start up urban gardens.  It was an impressive garden but I fear her goal of education might not be attainable since she reported there were very few people interested in what she was doing.
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Downtown Brunswick

Brent & Mary on First Friday

The new looking construction is for a movie set

The first Friday of every month is called, well First Friday.  Most of the downtown shops and restaurants offer free snacks and there is music and usually very cheap beer.  When we went there it was crowded with plenty of local folks and us marina people who, of course were wandering around and hitting the more desirable shops where the offerings were of higher quality.  Some pretty fancy hors d'oeuvres.

So there might be some curiosity as to what boat projects have been keeping us here.  Glad you asked!

We began, in earnest and with boundless energy.  First were closet lights in the master stateroom closet.  We had been using battery powered stick-on lights which proved wholly deficient.  So I bought a few LED lights and spent 2 days wiring them.  Simple job you might have thought and

Lights in the closets

indeed it is ... conceptually.  Not so much on an old boat threading wires through tight spaces and only after finding a convenient 12 VDC power source.  But they are in now and working great.

As an added bonus the aft shower sump pump float switch stopped working so after riding to West Marine for a replacement I re-wired it and its back working again.

Yes, those thin illuminated areas are the fly bridge lights

Next, fly bridge lights, again a conceptually easy project which took 2 days.  The lights themselves are some cheapie things I found at Ikea when LeAnn took us there.  I wired them up and sealed them with caulking.  

 I had to make a little wood piece to fit in between the two fly bridge seats.  Easy except not so much with only a rough hand saw.  But it turned out ok, and I found some stain/varnish on board that matched all the other stains too.  So now we have fly bridge lights and a light illuminating the stairway up to the fly bridge.

Primed portion of the forward stateroom headliner

We painted the forward stateroom ceiling.  That took a few days, with cleaning it, priming it and then two coats of paint.  It seems to be holding up well.  We decided to do this because the headliner wasn't responding to any cleaning agents we tried.  It was just to old and stained.  I got the idea from another boater who came to the same conclusion we did when he tried to clean his headliner.  He suggested the Gripper for the primer and Marquee for the paint.   We found both at Home Depot.
    
Spent some time and got our media player working on our wireless router so now we can watch NetFlix.  Perhaps it was bad Karma but the day we got the media player functioning the satellite TV conked out and I cant access the KVH satellite antenna data port to see the diagnostic logs until I get a D9-to-USB serial cable converter.  Thank goodness for Amazon.

Our down foot switch for the windlass on the fore deck hasn't been working for months so I ordered a new switch.  And got the wrong one.  It's circumference  was about 1/4 inch too big to fit in the existing hole and I really didn't want to try and drill a 2 1/2 inch hole in a 2 inch thick deck.

Epoxy to the rescue

And upon close inspection I noted the old switch was an Ideal not an Imtra.  So I ordered another new foot switch from Ideal.  In the meantime we had to take care of some water rotted deck coring, in and around around the hole.  Luckily West Marine was having a sale on tubes of epoxy.  I dug out the rot with a small screw driver and let it dry in the hot sun for a few days.  Then, after drilling out the existing screw holes to 1/4 inch we pumped epoxy into the holes.  I had previously taped up the interior of the large hole to contain the sticky, mud-like epoxy and it worked great.  After a day we had a perfectly hard deck again and a near perfectly round, epoxy filled hole.

Back months ago when we were in Stuart we had purchased a big roll of material intended to become new curtains for the staterooms.  And now was the time to make the transformation from roll of material to curtains.  We had brought it along to Wisconsin but never had the chance to make them.

Mary hauled all her material and sewing stuff to the yacht club and laid it all out on the bar to cut them to size.  It took two days, because the bar is, well a bar.  And drinks are usually being mixed around 4.  

We typically dont start any work until after noon, so the time crunch between working and cocktails can be tight.  But perseverance won out and it only took two days.  Then eschewing a sewing solution, she used Perky Bond Plus, a sort of iron on adhesive.  Once she had them completed we spent another day taking down the old curtains and hanging the new ones.  Pictures forthcoming.

New head light over the mirror

And since we were in the aft stateroom we decided to replace the "hideous" (Mary's term) mood lighting with new LED strip lights.  I ordered the lights and once they arrived it was another day removing all the old rope lighting and hanging them and then wiring the new ones.

We were on a roll.  Next I put up a stained board and hung a mirror/rail light in the aft head.  We had been living with, literally, a hole in the wall above on of one of the mirrors for months.  Now, its a nice rail light of all LED's.

Rebuilding hinge back of the sink lid

Then we used epoxy to build up a crumbled section of the sink lid where the hinge had been loosely hanging.   The sink is on the sun deck and can be covered up by this lid.  The hinge basically fell off the lid.   And, we did the same for a locker door located up on the bow where its hinge had fallen off due to broken wood.

The blue tape is holding it together while the epoxy sets up

But why stop now.  I epoxied up the broken shelf in the galley refrigerator door too!  And then applied it to some large cracks that formed in the crisper. 

I had ordered 3 refrigerator fans and they arrived today.  Why three fans?  Well, because the fly bridge refrigerator fan was not working when we returned.  I had also planned on putting an additional fan in the galley refrigerator space to exhaust the hot air which will (hopefully) keep the fridge from cycling on so frequently.   And one always needs a spare.   The fans are basically just computer cooling fans.  I had the fly bridge fridge one installed in no time.  

Our new cabinet exhaust fan

The galley fridge is really cramped into this space and getting it out is always a pain, but I managed, and cleaned off the heat exchanger fins before mounting and wiring in the exhaust fan.  Luckily the fridge manufacturer, Vitrifrigo has an electrical connection for this very thing which made it easier than digging into the wire harness.

On order now is the digital TV antenna, a new router, new GPS antenna, and a new dinghy VHF antenna.  Like I said, we're on a boat project roll.

Speaking of GPS, we have been enduring an autopilot only capable of steering compass courses.  It took a day, but I re-wired all the connections and adjusted the computer port settings all in an attempt to get the autopilot to follow a route that I can enter into the navigation software running on the computer.  And it I finally got it working!  Cant wait to try it out.  It means the boat will automatically follow a set course which I can pre-load.  It'll steer while we nap.

I've been regularly visiting Central hardware which is only a few blocks from the marina up "H"

The hardware store

street.   I trade witticisms with one of the hardware store employees, an older lady named Mary.  She's one of those hardware experts who knows everything,  Fun person.

On one of by visits I walked the extra few miles to Electrical Supply on Norwhich street.  I needed GFI (Ground Fault Interrupter) receptacles because I want to begin replacing the standard receptacles with GFI's.  Our inverter was equipped with one until it died this past February while we were in Marathon, and I could never get a replacement that would work properly.  It's about a 3 mile walk through some of the more interesting parts of town.  Glad it wasn't nightfall!   

Electrical Supply

Electrical Supply has a very informative staff and a wide variety of electrical stuff and advice.  Its in an older building which probably accounted for the large garbage can in the center of the floor collecting an impressively voluminous leak from the roof.   But the GFI's are top notch and the advice was rich.

Winn Dixie, Dollar Tree and West Marine hidden off to the left

The Winn Dixie grocery store, about two miles away is a pretty decent store.  Finally getting smart I took my bike down, oiled it up and put air in the tires.  Now my grocery forays are much easier because I can load up the bike basket with an impressive amount of groceries.  The only problem is the bike lock tumbled overboard so no bike lock.  I've been warned by others that this is the bike theft capital of the world.  

One day I rode there and realized I'd forgotten my glasses.  I cant read a label without them.  But since there's a Dollar Tree next to Winn Dixie I just stopped in there and bought a pair for $1. 

There is also a surprisingly busy MacDonald's there with $0.49 cones.  When I stopped in the ice cream machine was out of order so I saved $0.49!

Rocna is the silver anchor.  The whiskey bottle is holding down a patch protecting the epoxy

We had finally purchased a new secondary anchor, a 55 pound Rocna and it was waiting for us in Sherry, the dock masters office when we returned.  It's meant to replace the old Danforth we had been carrying around and never used.  In the Bahamas, some of the anchorages have grassy bottoms and the pointy end of this anchor will easily penetrate the grass.  Our 66 pound Bruce will to some extent but the Rocna handles these grassy bottoms much better.

Anyone have a burning desire for a 60 pound Danforth?

So we are trying to get rid of (sell) the old Danforth.  No takers yet.   However I have high hopes for the nautical flea market later this month.  Hope we're still here.

I had to make a trek to Walmart to buy a few things, one of which was a bike lock.  It's a trek, about 6.5 miles but there is a Lowed along the way too, so it's going to be a fruitful expedition.  Our wash down hose expired and spouts little jets of water from half a dozen holes.  Makes for a humerus spectacle but also renders the darn thing useless.  So we need a new hose from Lowes.

The route was through some pretty depressed areas, the passing by the College there is a shopping area and of course the ubiquitous Walmart.

I parked the bike in a bike rack at the Walmart and went in.  Knowing what I had to get, I loaded up the cart in record time.  20 minutes later I emerged lucking our grocery bag and three brightly colored bike locks.  Trouble is I didn't see my bike, only a mangled rusty looking thing in the spot where I left mine minutes ago.

It took me a few seconds before bulb began to brighten.  Crap!  My bike was stolen!  I couldn't believe it.  20 minutes!  The junker that was there didn't appear ridable and I really wasn't keen on stealing a bike.  Now what.

I was pissed.  So I decided to walk back to the boat lugging the 15 pounds of stuff.  I think I was secretly hoping I'd spot my bike somewhere along the way.  I walked back the same way I had ridden to Walmart.  Passing by Lowes, I had to stop there and buy a flexible hose to replace the leaky one we had to toss.  I had just enough room to cram it in my back pack.  The shopping bag was already overflowing.

It was a long walk with no bike!

It was a long walk and of course it was a nice, hot, sunny day.  Mid 90's.   As I was strolling by a Day Car center this large man sporting a huge gold cross popped out of a brilliant white Lexus and offered me a cold soda.   Said I looked hot and could he offer me a ride.  Sweet man

I walked by a small school and this nice man, wearing a huge golden cross, jumped out of his car and  offered me a cold soda noting that I looked a little wilted in the heat.  He was large, large man and the pastor at one of the many little churches around here.  Nice fellow.  I declined the offer though and trudged on.

Our only transportation now

I made it back to the boat and after putting everything away went over to the club house to share my cycle travails to those around the bar.  Turns out Jeff and Linda who are on our dock had two bike theft incidents, one where the thieves actually came on their boat attempting to steal one of their bikes.  Jeff, a short wiry Scotsman jumped out on the deck  and chased them off but then chased them all the way down the dock and out into the street where they got away.

So now we are down to a single bike.  But that isn't hindering our parade of boat projects, described in Part 2.