Miami Beach living

We have been a bit quiet the last few days. It has not been because we don't have what to report, we just have been so busy with boat projects, school work, ordering last minute parts and provisioning, that the boat has not moved the last 4 days. One of the major projects that we accomplished was purchasing and adding more solar panels to our array. After a few days out cruising, it became apparent that we have battery charging issue and are simply not replenishing the used up amps back to the battery. We kept taking steps of minimizing usage, we stopped using the Engels portable freezer, and watched battery usage, but that was not enough. I have discovered that only one of my two alternators was working, so I replaced the alternators on the engine, but they charge only when we run the engines which we don't want to do unless we are actually going somewhere. Second discovery was that my battery charger only charges at 10 amps and it was taking just too long time to try and charge the batteries by running the generator and charging at 10 Ah. So I purchased additional 40Ah battery charger so now we can charge the batteries at 50Ah which is much faster. Here in Miami is a company "Sun Electrics" which probably sells the cheapest solar panels in the USA, so for two days I kept measuring and remeasuring my bimini area and finally bought two more large panels. We spent last two days drilling and cutting and wiring everything together. Well it looks like Friday is looking promising for crossing to the Bahamas. Keep your finger crossed and hopefully the next post will be from outside of USA!