Is it football yet?

This has been a strange summer.  It seems as though the entire season just vanished somewhere and it happened over night.  June was here and Chattanooga had Riverbend.  Then somehow the calendar said it is almost the end of August.  Now that's just WRONG!!

I think it must have had to do with the way July 4th landed on the calendar.  That's the holiday, fireworks show and the week in Maryland that happens every year between Regina's birthday and mine.  

To celebrate her's, we went to the Biltmore in Ashville.  That place is really amazing as well as the way the Vanderbilt's lived and how the mansion got built.  This time we did a plantation tour which takes you off the beaten path to see some of the history and workings of the Estate. Of course, there's the afternoon visit to the winery and the food at their restaurants is fantastic.

Our annual trip to Maryland to visit our friends, Tom and Teresa, has become a tradition. This year, Brittany came from Texas to join us for a few days.  As always, the shrimp, crab and lobster were to die for and we ate until we rolled back onto the plane.  Tom and I started the week in his bilge replacing the water pump impeller on the generator.  Here I discovered about the only thing easier to get to on my boat than his.  What an exercise that was!  Much of the rest of the week was spent playing on his dinghy and visiting marine stores to help me figure out what kind I will ultimately buy.   

By the time that we had finished all of those activities, it was late July and we had missed over a month of boating on our Chattanooga lakes.  So now we are trying to catch up on river fun.  One weekend we went downtown for a River Front Nights concert, the next weekend was a big raft up with other Erwin Marina folks and then there was rain.  I guess we could have gone and anchored out somewhere in the rain, but it's more fun when the sun is shining and you can play in the water.  To make up for that, we went to the movies.

This weekend is forecast to be nice.  A couple of my projects are getting close to being completed.  There are only about two weeks left before we make the trip up river for football season!  I have a spot in the marina where we stayed last year lined up.  The Vols are predicted to be a much better team this year so that's very exciting.  We're going to be back in the Vol Navy and hopefully celebrating some big wins!!  GO BIG ORANGE.  We'll be there soon.

Spring sprung and summer is near

When the weather got cold and boating season basically ended, so did my blog.  There was not a lot of boating done this winter.  In some ways, I'm surprised we didn't do more.  It certainly wasn't as cold or snowy or iced over like a year ago.

So winter went by with some trips to Chattanooga to change oil and transmission fluid.  We went to the Miami Boat Show in February to investigate a number of additions that are on our list.  During that trip, I discovered that my air filters needed to be changed (read replaced) with the new upgraded model.  Now instead of boring old black filters on my engines, I have pretty new blue ones!!

And the reason they turn blue, is the color of the oil that you coat the filter media with.  All those other pieces and O-rings are buried inside the housing behind the blue filter.

This was our first trip to the Miami show.  We've done the Ft Lauderdale show a few times, but never this one.  It was overwhelming and virtually impossible to locate the dealers/booths that you want to find.  Obviously, they need an architect to help them with everything from graphics to layout.  (I wonder how I can turn that into my retirement job??)  In any event, we had a great trip.  Our friends from Maryland came down and met us for the show and that always makes things more fun.  We walked until we couldn't anymore, got more info than we could or wanted to carry, ate some great food and came home with more ideas.

A few of our ideas are beginning to take shape.  The generator now has an hour meter that a human being can read.  Our bilge heaters have their own outlets so the floor isn't covered with extension cords anymore.  A new VHF radio along with a AIS transponder are waiting to be installed.  The inverter that will be used to keep the generator from running non-stop is in the garage until my electrical guy figures out how we are going to tie it, the batteries and new solar panels together. And we have a new floor covering in the cockpit!!  This doesn't seem like a big deal until you have had to try to clean black marks off of white, non-slip fiberglass.  Oh do I love this stuff!!

 

The not so great part of our spring was finding the bottom of Chickamauga near Island Cove Marina. That turn out to be a very unpleasant experience. So I've been told that there are only those who have run aground and those that will - hopefully having now joined the club that means I don't have to do it again to maintain membership. Anyway, what ever was down there, in the middle of their marked channel BTW, was hard enough to bend both props. BoatUS had to pull us off so got to add that to the list of "done that's". 

While not officially summer, it is Memorial Day weekend. Our daughter is in from Texas and we're back to Bluff dock in Chattanooga. Time to enjoy her short visit and have some fun on board.   There are some festival events happening in town over the weekend so after we check those out we will take a run back up river to Paradise cove.  That is a popular place near Harrison Bay and is usually packed with boats and all variety of activities.  So the Flag is flying and this day set aside to remember all those who sacrificed everything for us to be able to enjoy all these freedoms.   Let's take this time to honor, to salute and to thank them.  That's what we will do as we end this spring weekend.