Day 4 – Fort Lauderdale

Not much to report today.

We spent six hours working on the paperwork, and vet visit, required to get Shelby, into Bermuda. We faxed 16 pages of information to Bermuda, and with a little luck will be issued a permit prior to our departure. Another of the owners, Bill Smith, aboard Autumn Wind, another Nordhavn 62, is going through the same hell with their two poodles. Hopefully it will work out – if not, we’re not sure what we’ll do. 

The late afternoon was spent working on installing an XM radio system. It will give us 100+ channels of radio, and weather information, until we reach Bermuda. Given that we’ll only be about five days to Bermuda, and then out of reception range, it was hardly worth doing – but I’ve always been curious to play with XM radio, and there is a add-on (at a huge price) that let’s you get marine weather – so, this gave me the excuse I needed to buy a new toy.

Because I felt guilty about not having anything new to say, I did snap a few pictures – but, quickly discovered that it is impossible to shoot pictures of boats while they are on shore. I’ll post better pictures as I get them. Visit http://www.kensblog.com/ and click on the Nordhavn Rally menu item. From there, select any of the Photo pages to see the pictures. I’ve also added a few electrical panel pictures at one person’s request.

Sans Souci’s main electrical panel

Sans Souci’s inverter control & battery monitor 

I wasn’t on the boat much today, as we spent much of the day at the veterinarian’s office. When we were at the boat, only Phil (the chef) and Rip (the captain) were aboard. I’m not sure where everyone was. There were classes all afternoon having to do with medical emergencies at sea. As we have St. John onboard, who is an emergency medical technician, I let him represent our boat in the classes. 
 

Overall, the boat has come together nicely. Other than buying fuel, we are ready, and impatient, to go to sea. There’s still some shopping to do, but I suspect that we’ll have lots of time to kill between here and Monday when we depart.

More tomorrow…

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