Gas up and pack up

We're leaving our summer marina in Norwich, Conn on Tuesday and it's Sunday as we write the next-to-last blog post that gets filed under "Summer 2013." Next week's post will describe our trip from Norwich to Portland, Conn.

I think it's fair to say that we have quite a lot of stuff to take off the boat. Frances has been living on the boat for the past five months and things accumulate. France hit the local package store for some empty boxes and she busied herself packing up the food and liquids that will go to Bill's house.

We've learned from years of doing this to just leave everything else where it is. The cold weather won't hurt the dishes, pot. pans, books and cooking utensils so all that stays.

We think we mentioned this before, but Frances washes our bedding and then uses a vacuum cleaner to suck the air out of vacuum bags. She throws in some dryer sheets and we end up with little cubes that contain all of our sheets, pillows, etc. This really works great. In fact, we store all of those little cubes on the boat during the winter.

We also found a way to mount our video camera facing aft, which is sometimes a more interesting view. We found Ram Mount parts and we bought three pieces ($34.00) that would enable us to mount to the 1" rail that runs across the back of our bridge and give us the ability to aim the camera at almost any angle and then tilt the mount back when the aft window was zipped down.

Unfortunately, on the mount's maiden voyage to the fuel dock on Sunday, we had the cam pointed too far downward. At least we know where to point it in the future.

We selected just a little of the video, from the time we approached our slip until we shut the engines off. Kinda boring but at least you can see us hit the piling.



Speaking of the fuel dock, we originally intended to get fuel on Saturday, but the wind was blowing like stink at the marina so we decided to go early on Sunday morning instead. On Sunday morning, after some coffee and just one section of The New York Times, we fired up the old Chryslers and motored over to get some gas.

We knew it was going to be a lot but the amount we took on surprised even us. 177 gallons and our capacity is just 210 gallons so for a boat, this was close to being empty. Even our shaky gas gauge was hanging on "empty." I'm sure we made J.P.Morgan Chase happy when we charged more than $800 for fuel.

We get a 10 cents per gallon discount at our marina as members of SeaTow and with this last fill-up of the year, the discounts really helped cover the cost of our SeaTow membership.