Monday November 16, 2015

Monday........at port in Charleston


We are now 2 weeks into this adventure and are halfway to Ft Myers Beach.  Pretty good considering we lost 2 days to weather and another day to mechanical issues.  Carol is marking our progress oon the Great Loop chart and it's good to see we are getting closer to our final destination. It looks like we have 2 more days to Georgia and then 2 more days to hit Florida barring any weather issues. We hear they are calling for rain on Thursday  but it may come in Wednesday night and hopefully we can be far enough south to miss most of it.






After a night thinking about what was wrong with the generator I called the mechanic we used 2 days ago and my friend Dan Jarzynski.  The 3 of us agreed  it was just a fuse.  Dan has been a great help as he has made this trip many times and can help me with just about any issue. The only challenge to correcting the problem was finding the "ceramic fuse" not readily available even at the Marina store.

Our plan for the day was to take the bikes to the marina hotel where there was a trolley that would drop you off in downtown Charleston.  We arrived in town directly beside the slave market and took a carriage ride.  In Charleston, these carriage companies all stop at a designated place in the city.  An employee of the city then assigns a tour to the next in turn carriage vendor based on a lottery system. The customer does not  choose what tour you want, you get what they assign the carriage driver.  We were assigned the history tour which consisted of a tour of the city as it was originally and how it grew.  We learned that like today they filled in a lot of low lying water to make more waterfront.  We also learned that Charleston is a city of disasters, fires, wars and hurricanes and floods.  Our driver was a native Carolinian and very knowledgeable of the history and politics of Charleston.  He had a coon dog named Mylie who rode along on the carriage rides and decided to jump back into our seat and curl up with Mike for the entire tour.  The tour was informative and gave us the opportunity to see alot in a short time.

We still needed to solve the problem of finding the fuse.  Fortunately we located a local TruValue hardware store  where I was able to get the exact replica of the fuses I needed. For future problems,  I bought 3 spares just in case.  Then it was to T-Bonz for a fabulous prime rib dinner and by that time we needed to meet the trolley for the return trip to the marina.

When we returned to the boat,  the fuses were replaced and the generator was running once again.
Tomorrow's plan is to get a head start on the sailboat so that we don't have so many to pass along the day.

Mike's buddy Mylie