Shelter from the storm

It isn’t really a storm, but a stationary wet system stirring up the seas and dumping a lot of rain. When the wind picks up, as it does every other day or so, it’s only for a few hours and not enough to get fussed about. Still, it’s keeping us from moving further up the coast, not just because of conditions outside, but because the river bar is stirred up and not safe. Day after day we hear boats calling Marine Rescue asking about conditions, and time after time the boats inch up to take a look then turn back to safe harbour. Even the fishermen are waiting it out, and they usually go out in anything short of gale force. 


The water tank is full and we wish, in times like this, that we had more capacity so we could take advantage of this free pure water. I take the opportunity to do some thorough boat cleaning which we need after so many months in the city collecting the airborn grime and dust. This is another of those boat life challenges. When we’re in populated places, the water is often not clean enough to run the watermaker so we need to use less water, especially for nonessentials like boat cleaning. When we’re in less populated places the water is usually cleaner and we can run the watermaker to our heart’s content but the boat also doesn’t get as dirty because we’re away from manmade pollutants. 

We’re boatbound most days and we’re taking on some of the back burner jobs we’ve been avoiding. As part of my bridge deck scrubbing project we did a little storage rethinking and moved some long term items out of short term spaces and vice versa. I also pulled out our huge collection of older CDs that were packed away when we moved aboard and haven’t seen the light of day since. I spent two days digitizing them to add to the rest of our music collection, all on hard drives. 


It took us a few years but we finally have an easy to use system for playing music onboard. We have a double din car stereo that plays CDs and DVDs and accepts inputs via USB or Bluetooth. We used to load up a 64gb USB stick with music and play from that, but the indexing on the stereo is cumbersome and you have to stand next to the screen to choose a particular song. Still, it worked well when we just hit shuffle and let it do its thing, with the ability to skip a track with the remote. 

Last year Drew sent me an unlocked android phone and a 128gb microSD card. We loaded it up with tunes and paired it to the stereo via Bluetooth and now we can play any cut we want from anywhere in the boat. Most of the time we still use shuffle but our collection is so huge and eclectic that we often need to consult the phone screen to identify the artist or album. They say the memory is the first to go. 

I know most landbased people have moved to streaming services like Spotify but our internet access is usually metered and often not fast enough to stream. We’re glad to have a big enough collection that we don’t get bored, but of course keeping up to date is a challenge. 

Now that I have all the older CDs digitized I need to find a home for them. They take up a surprising amount of space and I’m keen to get the weight off the boat. Next project will be digitizing the DVDs, a much slower process. 

We go ashore between showers to stretch our legs and buy fresh fruit and vegetables but mostly we’re waiting. 

2 Comments

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2 Responses to Shelter from the storm

  1. Leah

    What about sound quality?

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