Both of which were apparently in short supply the Provincetown vacation…so I’m way behind on updates.
What a nice vacation – great fun traveling with friends. Cuttyhunk was a pleasant stay for us, we got to walk around a bit and have a relaxing visit. Provincetown is, well altogether different. The weather was a bit dodgy and prevented any serious sun related activities, and a whale watch was not in the cards this time. Highlights included:
- Cuttyhunk Raw Bar!
- Mudslide night. Well, mudslide day really, since we started blending them up in the afternoon. One member of the party lost her shoes, and some of us managed to not get beat up in town in spite of our less than excellent condition. We still managed to cook dinner on the boat without blowing it up and dropping only one tank of propane in the water. New boat record set for pitchers mixed in one sitting (eight).
- Kid’s freedom…with four kids on the trip and staying at a dock we felt OK handing them money for dinner and telling them to meet us at the boat later. They had a blast walking around on their own, and the adults had some nice dinners out.
- Baked Stuffed Lobster at the Lobster Pot. Do not miss this.
- Drag Karaoke night at the Governor Bradford pub. Followed by a few other places…
- Being nice and dry in the Buzzards Bay chop on the way home
- I have to put the rubber band guns the kids found in an eclectic store on the “highlight” list since they loved them so much. I remain puzzled on how rubber bands have ended up in some of the places I have found them…apparently there was quite a battle on board while we were at dinner one night.
Of course, it would not be a trip on Evenstar without something causing me trouble. A self inflicted Alternator injury plagued part of it – being a good do-bee and tightening my belts did not pay off this time when the socket wrench slipped and something made a really bright spark. We had a new alternator and some fuses shipped to P-Town, but that didn’t work out so well. Wrong sized mount and disk on the alternator meant we couldn’t put it on. I thought I’d trashed the old alternator, but it turns out it was just the snubber that was burned out. This is a little diode used to protect the big expensive diodes on the alternator in the event of an unexpected event, like someone turning off the batteries or some idiot dropping a wrench across the terminals. I always wanted a backup alternator anyway.
More alarmingly the instruments just sort of…stopped…on Cuttyhunk before we left. I was able to partially restore them, but they were not liable and the autopilots were no longer working. Initially I suspected the Fluxgate Compass, but it turned out to be a loose connection to one of the autopilot controls that knocked out the primary and backup pilots.
The trip home was foggy and long with a lot of roll and chop. Makes me love the hard dodger more, but also raised my frustration level with the instruments and radar to a new high.
