Nirvana Is In Florida .. FINALLY!

After reviewing our blog, I realized that my last post was about our solar panel project. Since then, we actually left the dock in Louisiana! Leaving the dock wasn't easy, and realizing that our teak bowsprit was rotten just days before leaving didn't help! We were determined to not let this setback stop us from leaving, and with the help of a friend a new bowsprit was built and installed within a week! The new bowsprit was made by gluing pieces of Mahogany and Ipe wood together and then varnishing. Actually, it wasn't near as easy as it sounds, but that's the basics of it. We are so thankful for our friend's help. Without him, we may have been set back for many more weeks .. thanks Martin! 

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After finishing the bowsprit, we needed to install our new Mantus anchor .. it's a beast!

 After installing the anchor, we tackled a lot of last minute projects. There were so many things that needed to be done at the last minute, like storing our truck at my Dad's place, filling up the jerry cans, hauling our dinghy from storage & getting it inflated and placed on the bow, filling up our boat with groceries, and all sorts of random things. We were exhausted the night before we left, and our heads didn't hit the pillow till around 11pm that night. We didn't even have time to hang out with our dock friends for a farewell drink! But, we were already leaving a few weeks later than anticipated and we weren't pushing back our departure date for even one more day. So, our dock friends watched while they drank for us! 

We got everything done and were up at sunrise the next morning and ready to go.

On November 18th, we finally left the dock and headed East! It was a beautiful day, and it felt so good to FINALLY be headed somewhere new. We'd been waiting for this day a long time! It's weird, because I always planned about writing about the days leading up to this experience, but we were so busy making it happen that I just didn't have the time. Let me just say ... it was so surreal to actually leave the dock, and so exhilarating! Here's a quick video taken just minutes after leaving the dock ...

 We went through the Rigolets bridge, and then began our journey into unfamiliar territory. We entered the Mississippi Sound and stayed in Gulfport, MS the first night. Our first day was fun, with calm seas and blue skies! 

On the second day, we motored to an anchorage in Pascagoula, and on the 3rd day (my birthday) we awoke to a beautiful sunrise and enjoyed the company of dolphin while drinking coffee in our cockpit. I couldn't capture the dolphin, but there were a lot! It was so peaceful, and I couldn't think of a better way to start my birthday!

After we pulled up the anchor, we passed Dauphin Island and crossed Mobile Bay, which was like glass. We had a perfect day, being often escorted by dolphin and as an added bonus ... the "Blue Angels" were practicing overhead! Ken said he ordered them for my birthday .. LOL! That afternoon, we pulled into Lulu's alongside the ICW to celebrate my 53rd birthday, and the fact that we were now in Alabama .. and exactly 10 years ago we bought Nirvana! It was a birthday that will never be forgotten! The first photo below is just after crossing Mobile Bay and entering the canal of the ICW.

The following day, a water pump that we ordered the day before arrived (already dealing with the unexpected) and Ken was able to replace it without any problems. Luckily, the guy working at the marina gave us a ride to the hardware store and to Wal-Mart .. yes, the boating community is great! After two nights at Lulu's "Homeport Marina", we were on our way to Pensacola.

The passage from Lulu's to Pensacola was pretty interesting. It started down the ICW canal, which had a busy highway to our starboard side for a while. The highway was later replaced with beautiful homes along the way, and the area looked very similar to the canals back home. We then entered an area of really cool sand dunes. Once again, we were escorted by dolphin and treated to another "Blue Angels" show! I tried to capture this on my cheap phone, but just couldn't.

When passing the sand dunes, it was a pretty narrow passage. We were glad to have our chart plotter to stay on course! BTW, our "chart plotter" was an app (Aqua Map) on our iPad, and I'll be writing a post dedicated to it soon because it was so cheap and so easy. I swear, it's so much better than our expensive Lowrance and we love it! Below is a pic of it taken just after leaving Lulu's ...

After running for weeks, we were exhausted when we finally arrived in Pensacola mid-day. We decided to get some rest and dock near Pensacola Beach for a few days. The location was just what we needed! The beach was a short walk away, as well as "Happy Hour" and beautiful sunsets from our cockpit. See that sailboat on the outside dock facing the trawler? That's Nirvana! The very first photo in this post was taken from Nirvana one evening .. we loved the view!

After a few days of exploring the Pensacola Beach area, we moved our boat to a marina along the ICW in Pensacola for the holidays.

You see, we got a late start leaving Louisiana and we didn't beat the cold. Add to that the fact that not only one .. but two of our tenants gave their notice that they were vacating our rentals! For us, it made sense to stay nearby to repair and rent our rentals ourselves instead of paying a small fortune for someone else to do it for us. As much as we want to continue our sailing journey, we don't wanna freeze and we don't want it to cost us thousands of extra dollars when we're on a small budget!

So, we decided to rent a car and take the 3 hour drive back home to visit with family for Thanksgiving. Our daughter and her family were also in town from Colorado! Since Thanksgiving, we got our truck back from my Dad's place and we've been spending time between one of our vacant rentals and our boat in Pensacola. Luckily, our rental has a washer, dryer and refrigerator and the house doesn't require many repairs. We're once again sleeping on an air mattress, which brings back memories of our time in Puerto Rico! 

It's been pretty nice having a "condo" in Pensacola and a house in Louisiana to go back & forth to. In Orange Beach, we went to a fun Christmas parade that threw tons of candy. I liked the candy much better than the beads we get in New Orleans! We've also enjoyed the Christmas lights in downtown Pensacola and Perdido Key, as well as our traditional visit to New Orleans for drinks and tours of some of the well known hotels that are decorated for Christmas. The first photo is the famous Roosevelt Hotel lobby ..

and Fulton Street always has a huge tree and gingerbread display!

This year was our first visit to the Ritz Carlton to see their Christmas display. Their lobby was also beautiful, and they also had a gingerbread display creation of their own!

The best surprise at the Ritz .. free gumbo! It was really good too!

While waiting for warmer weather and our rental to be vacated, we decided to fly to Colorado for Christmas to see our "kids"! We enjoyed a beautiful "White Christmas" and I cried when they dropped us off at the airport. Our lil man will be two years old in less than a month!

We arrived back in Louisiana just in time to celebrate New Year's Eve with friends. Our other rental will be vacant soon, and we're hoping it's not in too bad of shape. The bad thing is that our currently vacant rental hasn't rented yet, but the good thing is that we have a comfortable place to stay during the Winter and while working on our other rental. When life gives us lemons, we make lemonade!

Ken's also picked up a few jobs while in Louisiana .. may as well make money while he can! We'll continue to make the best of our situation and enjoy both Louisiana & Florida. The views from our cockpit in Pensacola are pretty awesome and the sunsets are gorgeous .. I'll get a picture one of these times. Being next to the ICW, we often see dolphin too .. so rare in Louisiana! 

So what's our plans when the weather gets warmer in the Spring? We're not exactly sure. Since our rentals will always need to be dealt with (and a property manager would suck up our budget), we may decide to continue to stay closer to home. There's a ton of exploring to do in the Florida Panhandle, as well as in between there and Louisiana. We'll get it figured out!

Hasta luego .. until then. Mid-Life Cruising!

We've Got Solar!

As some of you may know, last year we tackled the task of installing a new battery bank of 315 amps on our small boat. With plans of anchoring a lot in the future, we needed a way to keep our batteries topped off, and solar panels seemed to be the logical choice.

Since our boat is only 30 feet, we don't have a lot of space for solar panels. We thought of adding rigid panels on either side of our cockpit, but this would require adding stainless tubing along the sides of our boat (where the lifelines are) and the hardware to attach the panels to the tubing. Being short on time & money, we decided to go with something simple .. semi-flexible panels on our Sunbrella bimini, Semi-flexible panels have improved, and have come down in price quite a bit.

  After a lot of research on semi-flexible panels, we decided to go with two Renogy 100-watt semi-flexible panels. Renogy* has a great reputation, they provide a 5 year material/workmanship warranty & 25 year power output warranty, and we're confident that the panels will serve us well. While researching panels, we called Renogy and they provided great customer service (but plan on holding on the phone a bit) and we thought it was pretty cool to learn that the company started as a school project by a young girl attending LSU. Our daughter graduated from there .. Geaux Tigers!

When placing our order for panels, we also ordered the Rover 30amp (in case we want to add more solar) MPPT controller, battery to charge controller tray cables 10 AWG, 20 ft of 10 AWG solar panel to charge controller adaptor kit, 2 - 5 ft of 10 AWG solar panel extension cable with MC4 connectors, and a pack of MC4 parallel branch connectors. This order would provide us with everything we needed to install our solar system, with the exception of the attachments to the bimini (see below) and two fuses, which we forgot to order from Renogy.

Our order arrived quickly and the panels and cables/connectors seem to be very well made .. we love how light the panels are! Here's a pic of the box to give an idea of the size of our panels. Yep, I was still in my pajamas and the pic is blurry .. too early for photos I guess!

The installation was pretty simple. The MPPT controller was added to the side of our navigation station for easy access to our batteries. By the way, we chose MPPT over PWM because it seems to be more efficient these days & gets as much power from the panels as possible.

Since I have an aversion to sewing, we needed to find a quick & inexpensive way to attach the solar panels to our bimini. After seeing an ad on Amazon for an attachment kit, we came up with our own kit from the local hardware store. Each panel has 6 small grommets, so for a total of 12 grommets we got 24 stainless steel fender washers (one for each side of canvas) and 12 each of a stainless bolt, nut & acorn nut. Instead of $60 for the Amazon kit .. we spent about $25 bucks! Before installing the panels, we placed them on the bimini and put a soldering iron through the grommet to make a hole through the canvas underneath .. easy! *Note: we called Renogy to ask if we had to cover the panels from the sun during installation .. it would be a real pain. We were told it wasn't necessary .. just be sure to plug in the controller to batteries first, and panels to controller last!

Here's a  couple photos of the bottom of the bimini ...

Once the panels were attached to the bimini, we ran them in parallel with the MC4 branch connectors and connected to the controller with the extension cables and the adaptor kit. 

Ken used a couple of tie wraps to keep things secure & neat ...

The cables were then run down our bimini frame and into a small hole in our cockpit leading to the navigation station and controller/batteries.

The tray cables were connected to one of our house batteries, and the temperature sensor that came with the MPPT controller (nice surprise) was placed next to the batteries. We were a little intimidated with the solar panel project, as the battery project was really stressful to us. However, we were very happy with the ease of the Renogy panel installation and our method chosen to attach the panels to our bimini. The complete installation took two partial days, but that's from start to finish .. not bad!

Once everything was hooked up (solar panels to controller last!), we needed to wait for the sun to come out. It was a very cloudy day, and rain was in the night's forecast. Since the installation, we haven't had a lot of sun to see the full potential of our Renogy panels, but we have had some pretty windy days to test our panel to bimini installation .. they've been holding up really well! 

Without many sunny days, we've still been able to charge our phones & run our 12v television, refrigerator & lights with no worries the past three days. After 3 days without being connected to our shore power charger, our AGM batteries were still somewhere between half & 2/3 full. We contemplated letting our batteries get a little lower in order to see how they'd charge (a pretty full bank won't draw as many amps from solar), but yesterday we turned the shore power charger on, as we're expecting rain & clouds today and next two days and we didn't want the batteries to get too low.  

Also (as expected), when we've had sun our boom seems to shade one panel or the other during the day. We're going to try moving the boom throughout the day soon to see what difference it makes. Anyway, we're told by Renogy that we should expect about 11 amps with sunny skies & no shade, which would be great! For those of you already with panels .. how many amps do you get from 200 watts of solar panels?  Let us know your thoughts ... we'd love to hear from you!

Overall, we're very happy with our solar set up and Renogy's products. The price and the quality of are hard to beat! We'll keep an eye of the panels' production, and look for a future post about our experience at anchor with our panels. Hopefully we won't have to run the engine much to charge our batteries! If you're going to order Renogy panels, please connect to them using our link below* (or on side of our web site's page) and save 10% (except on batteries & sale items) with the code: MidLifeCruising 

Oh, another thing we learned ... since we have the MPPT controller we don't have to worry about overcharging when we're connected to our shore power battery charger. The MPPT controller makes sure overcharging doesn't occur .. nice!

Can't write this post without mentioning that we were planning on sailing South .. yesterday! However, this past weekend Ken was preparing to install our Mantus anchor when he realized that our teak bowsprit was rotten underneath! Folks say "Just Go", but this isn't something that can wait .. it's a matter of safety! So, Ken's currently working with a friend on making a new bowsprit. We're in a race with Winter, and as luck would have it we went from record heat to below normal temps .. it's always "interesting" in our world. Hopefully we'll be back on track soon and not freeze!

*Just wanted to disclose that after we reached out to Renogy, they were kind enough to allow us to share an affiliate link. We'll make a small amount of money to add to our cruising kitty if you click on the Renogy link and make a purchase. It won't cost you anything more and you'll be helping us out!

Hasta luego .. until then. Mid-Life Cruising!

Nirvana Sails Again!

Since arriving home from Puerto Rico, we finally made Nirvana a full sailboat again. For the first time in over 6 years .. we went sailing with both sails up! When we removed our sails sometime around 2013, we had no idea it would be so long before we raised them again. We did sail with the main sail for the first time almost a year ago, when we tried out our new sail pack & lazy jacks. It was shortly after that when we had our head stay replaced. Since we had to replace the head stay, we went ahead and raised the roller furler drum in order to have a better view looking forward. Again, we had no idea that it would be almost a year before the head sail was raised .. we were distracted by Puerto Rico!

Shortly after installing our auto-pilot, we took Nirvana out for a sail. However, there wasn't much wind and we didn't move a whole lot, but it was sure nice to see both sails up again (see first photos)! A couple of weeks later we decided to sail to the quaint little town of Mandeville and stay overnight. We'd sailed to Mandeville years before, and thought it would be a great way to get re-acquainted with Nirvana. 

Before raising our sails we needed to pass through the Hwy. 11 Bridge, which has been closed for construction for several months. We had tried on two previous occasions to pass through the bridge, but nobody would answer the VHF! We were determined that this 3rd attempt would work, and luckily someone finally answered us this time around. We had to hail the bridge several times, and then wait about 30 minutes for the bridge to be opened .. but we got through! While we finally had them on the radio, we asked if we'd be able to get through again the next day. The dispatcher said that they had to open the bridge upon request, but they had up to 2 hours to do so. With our previous experience trying to hail the dispatcher, we were nervous going through the bridge. What if we couldn't get back through the next day?! Screw it .. we were going through!

Once we passed through the bridge, the wind died and we had to motor to Mandeville. However, the auto-pilot worked great and it was fun to be on the water. 

Mandeville provides a free place to dock for the night, so we tied up for the night and hoped for better wind the next day. 

The Mandeville lakefront is beautiful, with plenty of live oak trees & huge Southern homes. There's also several restaurants and bars within walking distance .. and a playground with a water fountain to cool off in next to the dock. This fountain was just what we needed to get refreshed before walking to a local restaurant for $1 tacos and live music!

The walk along the lakefront was beautiful!

The dock also provides free electricity (thanks to the city of Mandeville), but as luck would have it .. the electricity was out and the city office had just closed for the night when we arrived! It was hot as hell, and we weren't able to plug in our a/c .. ugh! Oh well, it was time to pull out our mosquito nets, open the hatches, run our four 12v fans, and see how our batteries held up!

It took a while to fall asleep in the heat, but we slept pretty well and our batteries were still pretty full. The next morning we had better wind and were able to raise our sails. We were able to sail for half of the trip (about 2 hours) before the wind died. Those two hours were so much fun, and we can't wait to sail again. It truly had been way too long since we sailed Nirvana for any length of time. We're getting our confidence back!

As you can see in the photo below, raising our roller furler drum was a great decision .. we can see ahead of us now!

Here's a close-up of the two new tangs we had fabricated by our boat neighbor. How lucky were we to have him make these for free?! We were very appreciative and made it up to him.

After waiting a while for the wind to pick up, we reluctantly lowered Nirvana's sails and motored the rest of the way back home. We started hailing the bridge dispatcher about 30 minutes before getting close .. no response. As we approached the bridge with no contact, we started getting nervous about getting stuck on the wrong side of the lake. After about 20 minutes of floating near the bridge and trying to get a response, we saw a barge making its way towards the bridge. Hallelujah .. the bridge certainly couldn't ignore the barge! Luckily, we were correct and we were able to follow the barge through the bridge after waiting about an hour. We made it home!

As we approached our slip, it occurred to me that we've pulled Nirvana into our slip several times since that first time in 2017. We're getting better and haven't bumped the dock since then. It's always a good feeling to tie up with no "excitement".

While we look forward to sailing soon, we've got some more projects to tackle .. our solar panels arrived! We're excited to be working with Renogy Solar, and if you order from them use the code: MidLifeCruising to get an extra 5% off (excluding batteries). We'll be writing about our installation and thoughts, so stay tuned!

Hasta luego ... until then. Mid-Life Cruising!