Friday already. The week flew by before my eyes! Last year I would have said "another day, another dollar in the case". Now it is more like "another day, another dollar out of the case" - in fact many of them. But, we have everything under control so far... except for the unbelievable amount of boxes of equipment for the boat. Boxes of different size and weight are still coming in almost every day. If I am counting right, we are still expecting 4 more deliveries :-). WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF SPACE in the living room and it is far from being livable.
Our neighbours are getting curious - slowly . The peak of box delivery craziness however, was this Tuesday when I picked up our solar panels from our neighbours living below us (they are huge - not the neighbours, the panels of course). Their facial expressions were priceless. You could literally see the wheels turning. What the hack are these guys ordering? On the solar panel boxes huge letters with the brand name and something with "yacht" indicated that this isn't really something standard from Amazon. I kept my mouth shut, though. Most of our neighbours are more in the category of "Al the Doughnut Eater" and wouldn't understand what and why we are doing this, so I am not keen on starting new discussions to feed the grapevine.
What are we doing with solarpanels anyways? If you are not familar with boats... we actually live on our boat and you can compare it to living in a house. We need electricity to switch on lights, run computers and our fridge to keep the beers cold. Where does the electricity come from? Well, we do have large batteries on the boat (like in a car, only bigger) and those provide the power... until they are empty.
Now you have to figure out where to get new power? We have two major sources. One is our diesel. Like in a car this engine is feeding our batteries with power. Since we are having a sailing boat and don't want to run the engine that often, we need a different source as well: Solarpanels are one solution. We will mount them on the back of the boat and they will provide us (on a sunny day) with just enough electricity to keep our batteries charged and the beer cold.
 |
| This is how it will look like on our boat as well. Sort of. |
Last weekend Stefanie tackled our medical supply. She is taking all this stuff very serious and we are sporting a huge selection of hard-core drugs now and some homeopathic medication along with syringes, scalpels and other stuff that you need when traveling remote places.
 |
| A selection of our homeopathic medication :-) |
Well, even though it looks like the chaos is getting bigger, we are getting closer to wrap things up here and leave. Life is good! /k.
I was wondering when you'd be running out of storage space! Sounds like a true Tetris effort of getting all your gear stashed somewhere:-)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the pic with the solar panels, I was curious where they would go. I guess the next step is a "motorized automatic panel inclination adjuster" to maximize your solar power intake! - Ich fang dann schon mal an euch einen zu designen:-)
Ja, "motorized" wäre toll. Tatsächlich haben wir zwei solcher Teile bestellt. Allerdings müssen wir die manuell "nachführen" und die gehen nur in eine Richtung und nicht nach links oder rechts.
ReplyDeleteUnd wegen Storage Space... da haben wir eigentlich genug. Ich übertreibe natürlich auch maßlos. Es sind schon einige Kisten, aber das meiste Zeug wird ja im Boot verbaut, bzw. gegen alte Sachen ausgetauscht. Also alles halb so wild. Ich überlege gerade noch ein Kanu zu kaufen. You never can have enough toys :-).