Hello Once Again
 |
| St Augustine Marine Centre |
I suppose many of you will have given up on ever hearing
from us again thinking we may have merged into the American society taking down
roots here – NO WAY - this adventure has
a way to go yet.
Five months on, with SHAMAL on the hard in the St Augustine
Marine Centre in northern Florida, seemed like a life time, even though we were
not living on board all that time. Once
out of the water we started on that GREAT list of boat jobs. It was February and still very cold. It took us the first ten days to get our
power sorted out. As you know the USA
system runs on 110 volts while our system is 220 volts. With our first step-up step-down transformer
blowing every five minutes, we had some cold nights. Alec managed to sort that by buying a larger
transformer which also meant he could run all his power tools from it as
well. The first main job was to have the
seals in the sail drive replaced. That
involved moving the engines forward to fit them in, but that job was completed
before Alec had to leave for Vietnam to do a yacht delivery with an American
couple.