Day 266 Getting settled.

We're settling in after our first night here.  I met some neighbors this morning.  Randy and Sharon.  They're on a sailboat a few slips down from us.  They've been here a while.  They're "do it yourself" sailors so I hope to be able to get a lot of knowledge from them.

After we docked, as we were plugging into the dock, we found that the socket on deck that the cord plugs into that carries the electricity to Zephyr had melted one of the plug holes on the cord.  We had already replaced the cord once thinking that it was a bad cord.  Now it appears to be a bad socket.  I phoned Tony at Sea Marine and he will be ordering the replacements in for us.  It will be there tomorrow which will work out perfect as we will be back up in Port Townsend to pick up some special orders that also came in yesterday.  If I order from him, there is no sales tax and no shipping fees.  A nice savings.

We got out Direct TV dish set up last night.  This time, we set it up on the forward deck instead of on the dock.  We wanted to see if we were steady enough to maintain the signal.  So far so good.  The dish is mounted onto a nice slab of 3/4" plywood so it's not going anywhere.

Randy and Sharon told me that the dock has three otters in residence.  As I was talking to them, I saw them swimming around out in the bay.  About ten minutes after coming back on board, suddenly there they were on our deck wandering around our boat.  They may be cute, but one of the last thing you want wandering around the deck of your boat are otters.  They tend to make big messes and are known to chew up lines and canvas.  I rushed on deck and shooed them off.  They just stared up at me without a care in the world.  Now we have to figure out a way to keep them off the boat.

I tried to solder the wire for the fog horn last night so I could get that problem done.  I just couldn't get the solder to stick to both the post and wire at the same time.  The iron(battery operated) may not be hot enough or it may be the wrong solder.  I'll buy a corded iron and try it.  At the worst, I"ll find a computer shop that does this work and have them do it.

It's laundry day now that we are at our new home.  The machines are cheaper so that is a nice perk.  When you don't have big closets and lots of clothes, you can run out of duds real fast.

While we will be paying for our lodging, the costs for Brownsville are about half of what we would have had to pay if we had stayed in Point Hudson.  It was $560/month plus electricity(metered).  We're paying $392 for everything from now to the end of February.  We are now scoping out our new neighborhood to see what it has to offer.  The Brownsville area is right in the midst of a much larger shopping area.  Lots more things available that I would have had to drive a long way to find anywhere near Port Townsend.  That has it's advantages and disadvantages.  If it's not available, you won't buy it.  If it is available, you'll spend more money.

Well, we're off to do laundry and take showers.  Time to get everything clean.

If your are checking us out on Google Earth.  Here's or latitude and longitude:

47 39.05 N   122 36.44W.