May 29, 2019 – Well, it was a relaxing afternoon yesterday, but a bit more tense in the evening as we could see on radar the big thunderstorms coming our way…to which they added a tornado watch. Oh, boy.
It passed over us, with small hail, and ferocious wind; everything survived intact, and the rest of the night was much quieter.
The morning came with a nice sunrise and the harbor was like glass, but the clouds stayed pretty low and heavy, and the wind kicked up some, so here we sit on a grey and blustery day, reading and catching up on a few things.
This would be the first stay-put day while not connected to shore-power, so we were very interested to see what contribution our new solar panels would make toward helping the batteries carry the load of the fridge and other small appliances and boat systems. There was only a minute or two all day when the sun actually poked through, but the overcast was bright enough that the solar was able to provide an overall net charge of the batteries from 87% to 93% state-of-charge, while outputting around 400 watts. The charge controller has a bluetooth app that lets us see its instantaneous and historical output. The four panels are each rated at 200 watts (for a total of 800) at full sun, so the fact that we got half that with no direct sunlight at all seems pretty promising.
By mid-afternoon, we were itching to get off the boat, and we had to pay for an additional night of mooring, so we called for the yacht club launch to come pick us up. We walked down through the Staten Island neighborhood of modest homes to ‘Frank and Sal’s Italian Market‘. We had done a Google Maps recon, and this appeared to be a promising stop to get a little ‘local flavor’.
Italian grandmothers shopping, Tony and Vino (really!) behind the counter, more brands of imported Italian pasta and canned tomatoes than we could count, and cheeses, meats, olives, pastry, prepared foods. Didn’t seem like the kind of place for picture-taking, so you can engage your imagination, but we bought bread, pasta, sausage, cheese, olives, cannoli and sfogliatelle, and walked back to the boat with our backpack loaded with dinner.
We then had the launch take us back to the boat, in whitecaps and 1 foot waves, with rain starting to spit. We fired up the generator, and went to work to whip up a very genuine Italian dinner aboard.
Just because you aren’t tied to a dock doesn’t have to mean that you are roughing it.
