Video Transcript

00:00:00
In the last video, we started the Great Loop in Sebastian, Florida, and made our way to Indian Harbor Beach. But, after waiting out a storm for a few days, we were out of snacks and had to head to shore. First time leaving the dinghy somewhere, it’s just a little weird not being able to lock it up. I’ve had lots of boats for fishing and stuff, but basically I launch them, I’m on them the whole time, then I put them back on the trailer and take them home, so a little weird. I wish there was somewhere we could have locked it.

00:00:46
It just wasn’t long enough. We do have a cable and a lock and everything, but had to just tie up to a tree. Honestly, once we walked past it, you’d have to know that that spot is there and go out of your way to get there. Fingers crossed it’s there when we get back. Well, then it rained on us even though it wasn’t supposed to, but that’s okay. That’s how it goes. We successfully went to Ace Hardware and Publix and we’re almost back to the dinghy.

00:01:21
I cross at this light. Here. [laughter] The water’s flowing now. Oh my goodness. Look at that. All right. Well, rookie mistake, we didn’t bring anything to bail the dinghy out, so we had to pull it out. It was full of water. Thankfully, it’s filled with foam, so it can’t sink. We pulled it up out of the water and pulled the plug and we’re just waiting for it to drain. I’m going to have to hop in and put the plug in real quick and then we’ll head back.

00:01:53
I thought we did it on purpose on behalf of testing for mantis. Yeah, just testing the boat out. It doesn’t sink. I can tell you. Yeah. We made it. [laughter] That was a bit of an ordeal. We weren’t sure we were going to get it, but we did. What do you think about that, Elyse? I feel like it’s some sort of new boater hazing ritual. [laughter] By the way, this is Elyse’s second time in the dinghy, or a dinghy ever.

00:02:24
I think I’ve taken this out fishing I don’t know, a dozen times or so, so I’ve been in it quite a bit. It’s a great little boat. Time to do the morning checks. This is day two of the Great Loop. Check our battery percentage first. Looks like we’re at 42%. And it’s 70° outside in the engine room and 73° in here. Weather report is beautiful. We hung out here at Indian Harbor Beach for the last few days waiting out a big wind storm coming through, so that’s whyour batteries are so low.

00:03:06
I already checked out the solar forecast today and it said we should produce about 7 kW is what it’s projecting, which would give us about 55% increase or close to 100%, especially when we turn on our engines and run our DC DC chargers. Speaking of engines, let’s hop in the cockpit and check those out. We’re going to start with engine number one. So, here’s the oil. While I’m at it, radiator fluid looks good. And our belt looks good. Okay, looking pretty good.

00:03:42
All right, now I’m going to do a visual inspection in here. Okay, our house batteries are looking good. Got to clean up a little wiring still. Air filter looks good. Turbo’s good. Don’t see any leaks back here. I don’t see any leaks from the injectors. No leaks up here by the radiator cap or anything. Now, let’s take a look under the engine. Looks good down there. I don’t see anything on our front of the engine. Go ahead and move to the middle locker. You noticed our generator is not in here?

00:04:19
It was leaking oil really bad and the cost to repair it was more than it would be to buy a portable generator. So, we decided to go ahead and pull it out and buy a generator if we need to. I’ve never needed a generator in over 120,000 miles of RV travel. And this is my fifth solar system that I’ve lived off of since 2018. Going to continue looking at the engine here on number one. Alternator’s looking good. Wiring connections look good. I don’t see any leaks in my exhaust.

00:04:52
This is our auxiliary battery bank, which is 240 amp hours. Our auxiliary battery bank can also crank the engines and then we have our main cranking battery and an AGM, that looks good. And on to the engine number two. We did have a transmission leak right here a couple days ago, so that looks good. Okay, looks good. Front of the engine looks good. I don’t see any leaks in here and the exhaust looking good on this side. Fuel filters. Take a look at them. That’s engine number one. That was the generator and that’s engine number two.

00:05:28
Now, let’s get back out of here. I could open this third hatch and make things a little easier, but it’s not hard just to lean over. You can see I got pretty good room in here. Into V-drive number one. Seacock looks fine for that engine. Sea strainer looks great. Uh-oh. Got a little leak in the bottom of this fitting. I’ll tighten that up. These lines came like this from the factory. These are brand new V-drives, so this is something that was just loose or maybe worked its way loose.

00:06:02
Okay, see how that does. I don’t feel anything on these hoses. Nothing is up here. Nothing dripped down. Sometimes with the with hoses stuff will leak up here and drip down. So, my leak is down here. So, I’m going to wipe that off and check it later. Looking good, right at half. Move on to number two. May seacock strainer looks good. Seacock is open. Looks good. Just see some water and some wax that melted from our repacking. And looks like 50%. Sounds like somebody’s going through the bridge already.

00:06:40
We got a swing bridge to go through this morning. Go ahead and fire the engines up. So, I’ll take a second and show you our anchor. That’s for the last 3 days. Solid. Putting on our burgees for the first time. We got the AGLCA, of course. And I’m not going to tell you what this flag is, but I think you should look it up. If you don’t know, you’ll find out in St. Augustine. Pretty cool.

00:08:23
A little over 2 hours in we’re still averaging about 9 mph or 7.5 knots. I think we’ve covered 17 miles so far, 17 nautical miles. So, doing good. We just came through the Cocoa Bridge. A little squall went over us, so we had to throw on the rain jackets real quick. It’s a little brisk today. Well, it’s just windy with like I think it’s 72 degrees or so, it’s beautiful temperature, but with the wind and that mist, it got a little chilly for a second.

00:08:57
Making good time. About halfway through, couple more hours to go. We should be there right at lunchtime. [Playing] We’re taking it on the beam. Batten the hatches. We’re at the quartermaster. We’re almost there. We’re about 30 minutes out. We decided to go to the Titusville City Marina to fill up on water and get some fuel for the dinghy. We’re heading there, but right now the the wind’s out of the northeast, and so the way that the ICW runs through here, we’re taking it a little bit more on the beam. It’s not directly on the beam, butit’s pretty close.

00:10:11
Occasionally we get a decent wave and it kind of tosses us around a little bit. But, almost there. Just cruising along enjoying it. It’s a beautiful day. I’m sure they’ll be able to tell by my beautiful camera work. We successfully made it to our anchorage and dropped the hook. Things are going good. We had some lunch, and so I figured I’d catch you up. We stopped by the Titusville Marina to fill up our water tanks, and then we moved over here to this anchorage.

00:11:10
Now, we’re right by a railroad track. You can see the bridge back there, and the railroad goes right here. We’re pretty close to shore. But apparently the train doesn’t come through here pretty much at all. It’s very rare, once every few days. So it should be nice and quiet. And in the background over here, I’m not sure if you can see that white building, but that is NASA. This is the JFK Space Center, or the John F. Kennedy Space Center.

00:11:35
Now, growing up in Central Florida, I remember as a kid going outside during elementary school and watching the rocket launches. It’s kind of cool to be anchored here on a boat as an adult right by the shore. I mean, look how beautiful this is. Now, we cannot go to shore right here um because of the railroad, but if we go around the point by the bridge, we can access Merritt Island. And the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge is right behind us.

00:12:06
We’re about to drop Zed, our Mantus dinghy. We were originally supposed to get here at 12:15 PM, then we stopped and got water, and by the time we actually got over here, I think it was closer to 1:30 PM. Overall, not too bad. And what a beautiful spot. Nobody around. It’s nice and quiet. Gorgeous. If you’re wondering about our batteries, I actually just got done running the water heater. When we stopped, our battery was at 93%. Now we’re at 91%. And I just turned the water heater back off.

00:12:45
We got here, microwaved some lunch. Elyse heated up some split pea soup that she made the other day in the slow-cooker, which was super delicious. And then we ran the water heater. Because it was early in the day, I like to run the hot water heater, or the water heater earlier, so that way the solar still has some chance to kind of recoup the battery. Since we were already at 93% when we got here, I just ran the water heater until it turned off, which is electric. And once it turned off the first time, I just flipped the breaker off.

00:13:12
It’s not going to keep keep it hot, but I know that that tank is insulated really well, and it will stay hot for hours. Made it back to Swamp Puppy. We got Zed tied up for the evening. Going to leave him down. So, I got a line over here and a line on that side. Two lines just in case he tries to grow some legs and take off. Which apparently is a common problem with the Mantus dinghies.

00:14:54
I know that because Keeping Up With Kove, her Mantus dinghy has I think took off like two or three times on her now. [laughter] I got two lines tied up. This is the first time leaving him down. We had a nice little time over at Merritt Island. I did want to report that when we got back to Swamp Puppy, our battery was at 100%. We have 920 amp hours of battery bank at 12V. That’s our house battery bank, and we lived on that system, or on that battery bank for about 2 and 1/2 days because it was inclement weather.

00:15:21
There wasn’t really any solar. A little bit came in, but not much. And everything in our our boat is electric. You know, we don’t have other than the diesel engines, our water heater is electric, our cooking is all electric. We had no problems using all of that just like normal. We used the cooktop. We cooked several meals. I mean, we even made pancakes one morning. This morning when I woke up what was the battery at? 40-something percent? Not too bad after sitting still for 2 and 1/2 days with inclement weather.

00:15:48
And then today, one day of cruising, we did about 30 miles, and between the solar and the DC-DC chargers, we were able to get the battery back to 100%. Pretty happy with that. While Elyse and I were working on this boat for the 485 days it was on the hard, we just kept dreaming about anchorages like this. You see, on our maiden voyage, which was 200 miles from Key Largo, Florida up to Fort Pierce, Florida, the very first night in Key Largo, we stayed just on the other side of Biscayne Bay, and it was just gorgeous.

00:16:21
It was nice and protected. It was quiet. We tucked up in kind of like this. We’re just going to take tomorrow and just stay here. We’re not going to move, even though the weather is beautiful. Our next jump up from here should be somewhere around Daytona or Ormond Beach. But we’re going to take tomorrow and do some work on the videos. Hopefully you’re enjoying them. If you are, make sure you give us a like and leave us a comment. Share it somewhere.

00:16:46
Hype it up. That’s a new thing, apparently. If you want to hype our video, that would be excellent. But we’re going to take tomorrow and work on the work on the channel, get some other little projects done, and then the day after that, not sure if we’re going to keep heading north, or if we’re going to work again. We shall see. Just depends on how long we want to enjoy this beautiful solitude. See you!