For 30A I use a 30A to 20A adapter like this one with a household-type receptacle tester like this one. It works perfectly!

​To test 15/20A receptacles, I separate the adapter from the tester and start testing. 

For testing the standard 50A 120/240V (split-phase) receptacles often found at marinas, I built this monstrosity. It works very well. 

Credit where credit is due: I should note that the inspiration for this came from my friend, Sean on MY Vector who built a similar tester that he posted about here. 

Mine comprises a NEMA SS2-50P, marine-grade 4-pin plug, a digital AC voltage indicator, and two NEMA 5-15 female 120V pigtails (18 AWG is fine for this since there will be no real current involved).

• Drill holes for the pigtail wires in the sides of the 50A plug.
• Mount the voltage indicator (see image below) and connect it only to L1 and L2 (do not connect in any way to neutral or ground). 
• For the pigtails: wire ground and neutral to the ground and neutral lugs in the 50A connector; pigtail hots are split—one to L1 the other to L2 on the 50A plug. 
• Once the assembly is otherwise complete, plug the outlet testers into the pigtails.

To use: the outlet testers tell you if either 120v side of the 50A receptacle is  properly wired or not. The voltage gauge will only come on if you have good split-phase 240v power available. If the outlet testers show correctly wired, but there is no 240v reading (the voltage indicator likely will not even light up if there is no ~240v available), you are dealing with a 120v pedestal that does not provide split-phase 240v—you will be able to use 120v devices aboard, but not 240v devices.

This is just a short entry to thank everyone who has shown such compassion and concern for us in recent weeks. For those who don't follow our travels on Facebook, I suffered a freak accident on Sunday, April 26. During a docking in Morehead City, NC, the distal tip of my right middle finger was rather violently removed by a rapidly accelerating pilothouse door due to a poor design decision that I have since cured in a fit of pique. I managed to finish bringing the boat alongside the dock and find my missing appendage before passing out, and Stacey did well to keep her wits about her and get the boat safely tied up while marina staff attended to me. I was then brought to a nearby emergency room where the tip of the finger was stitched back on.

This injury was just the last half inch or so of the finger, but it did involve a tuft fracture—the very tip of the finger bone. The last seven weeks have been a lesson in human anatomy that I wish I didn't need. The fingertip is growing back. It will likely be ever so slightly shorter than it was, and its appearance will almost certainly not be the same afterward. All of the re-attached tissue has turned into a natural bandage that will ultimately slough off after the healing is complete, and I'm assured that what is happening under that zombie flesh is nothing short of miraculous. Here's hoping, because even seven weeks on, it still looks a bit like something out of a horror flick to this finger owner. Mind you, while it may lack the ultimate length of its former self by a millimeter or three, I'm assured that I will adjust to it in due course and will be back using it as I did before. Here's hoping they're right.

We are underway on a favorite waterway—the Waccamaw River in South Carolina, just northeast of Georgetown, having just left after an idyllic evening anchored there savoring a classic, old-school waterfront town—dining at the delectable Rollin Local and walking around. Neither groceries nor hardware were needed, so the stop was purely for the joy of it, and to try out the new-to-us tender—the now-fourth iteration of Li'l Stinker.

Last time I wrote here, we were in St. Marys, GA, suffering under a barrage of mechanical issues: overheating engines and a failing, recently rebuilt starter on the generator. The starter quit (again) while we were there; the overheating, however, was cured before finally getting underway, somehow appropriately, on April Fool's Day—making a nice poke to St. Simons, GA, where we anchored in the Lanier Island North anchorage we tend to favor there.

We arrived in St. Simons Sound with a mission: ship the starter back to the rebuilding shop in Sanford, FL, and source another locally. Contact was made with the local Great Loop Harbor Host. He was out of town, but was good enough to refer the situation to his mother, who loves to help boaters in distress. We dinghied to the nearby park's courtesy dock and met up with Nancy. She took the starter to the post office—twice, as it turned out, and through no fault of her own. When the starter first failed, the rebuilder told me to ship it back. We used the address on his business card. What we couldn't have known was that he doesn’t get mail at his place of business. It was returned to sender. A call to the rebuilder clarified that I should have used his home address, which he then provided, and Stacey relayed to Nancy. Two post office trips, two flat-rate boxes, each insured for the $600 retail value of the part, ran $40 in postal fees apiece from Nancy's hands to Florida. Twenty days. Eighty dollars. While waiting on all of this postal madness, we sourced and ordered two aftermarket Amazon replacements at $93 each with free shipping to the marina in Beaufort we’d be using in mid-April with a week-long turnaround. Finally, our inconvenience had an expiration date, and as I’m writing this weeks later, the generator is humming satisfyingly beneath our feet. Regardless, we feel so fortunate to meet people as wonderful as Nancy in our travels, and could not thank her enough for her generosity of spirit and deed. She also brought us her gas can so that fuel might be sourced for our backup generator—a Honda EU2000i carried "just in case." A replacement gas can was shipped to her house to repay our debt.

New friends were also met at the nearby marina who helped in a failed attempt to find a replacement starter at a nearby equipment dealer. Thanks, Rob and Alanna (loopers on M/Y Let's Go)!

Disclaimer: This blog post was written in April, before my freak accident that sidelined our travels until July or so (I'm fine, but it was scary for a little while). I will be writing about all of these things soon, but typing has been a bit of a chore of late. More on all of that soon…. Anyone who needs closure sooner should visit our Facebook page and scroll back to the end of April.

We are anchored in St. Marys, Georgia where we were towed in yesterday after both engines overheated in an uncanny show of solidarity—first the starboard, and when I went to the engine room to check it, the port engine followed its twin's lead.

This morning, I spoke to Brian at American Diesel, who immediately identified the issue and talked me through the recovery. Eventually, I will be making a modification to the engines to prevent a recurrence, but for now, we have a working pair again, and the knowledge for preventing the issue in the future. 

Saturday we ran in rough conditions approaching St. Andrew Sound. Wind was out of the NE and started bashing us as we came around the bend approaching Brickhill River. Rather than turn the inside of the boat into a hunt for all the flying fruit and spuds from our hanging baskets, I spun us on our heel and backtracked about 4 miles to anchor out of the fetch.

In the morning, we overheated after being underway only 3 or 4 minutes. We re-anchored nearby in a very conveniently placed spot just deep enough for us west of the ICW red markers.  Coolant was everywhere, but I could not pinpoint the source. It was coming from around the caps—which always belch a little anyway—and from the weep holes. The combination made for an indeterminate point of failure.

The rough seas evidently whipped the usually harmless air from high in the expansion/header tanks into the cooling loops, aerating the coolant as it circulated. Overnight, as the engines sat, those millions of tiny bubbles buoyed up and coalesced at the high point of both engines—in the water-cooled exhaust manifolds—forming a localized airlock. Because the overflow ports are salted solid, the systems had no proper expansion path (There is a fix for that which I am now aware of—a modification to the expansion tanks to include a properly designed overflow path. It's a job for another day).

Once underway yesterday, that trapped air gave way to steam. Since steam expands exponentially, it spiked the pressure beyond allowable thresholds, forcing coolant out of every available pressure-relief orifice. The temperature sensors, located near that high point, triggered the alarms and pegged the gauges.

Refilling the expansion tanks while the bleeder valves at the manicooler high points were open successfully purged the trapped air. We have now had a successful run of both engines. We're back in the saddle!

We’re at anchor in the lowlands of Georgia, just south of St. Andrews Sound. We were hoping to get further today, but with the punishing wind that came up after we got underway, we encountered seas uncomfortable enough to turn us around to find a safe (hopefully gentle) place to stop.

​Since I last wrote here—which was some time ago when we were on the west coast of Florida—much has happened. We have put miles under the keel, eaten wonderful meals, and spent time with treasured friends. Stinkpot remained anchored in Treasure Island for a full month while we attended the St. Pete Boat Show, the Seattle Boat Show, and spent time with our friends and fellow cruisers, Sean and Louise on M/Y Vector.

​On February 10, we got underway, running as far south as Fort Myers before crossing the state via the Okeechobee Waterway. We turned north on the ICW in Stuart. Visited with friends Steve and Leah, as well as their son Alex and daughter-in-law Adina, in Fort Pierce. We made our way to St. Augustine, where we represented Argo Navigation at the South Sea Cruisers Association Gam. Then we made our way toward and up the St. Johns River to Astor where we spent a week visiting with friends, and where my son, Kieran, flew down to join us for some family time. Our generator fritzed on our way there, and I spent some time in Astor getting it shipshape again. We left there heading back north, spent two days in Jacksonville before heading into Georgia yesterday, where we find ourselves now enduring a gale that pegged our anemometer early-on with a 61 MPH gust, prompting us to seek shelter for the day.

So here we sit with the wind howling around us, bouncing the boat around like a toy boat in a bathtub with a tantrumming toddler, with nothing to do but wait for it to let us pass to the north and consider what is to come. Naturally all of this had me considering that I should write an entry for this blog. Frankly, I have been working on one for some time now—2500 words of blow-by-blow from Treasure Island all the way to St. Augustine. I was reading back over it to continue the tale when I realized something.

This is boring. It is.

It’s exactly what I set out to do when I started this blog in 2022, but the formula is that of a travelog. I guess I set out to make something boring. Sorry about that.

​There’s certainly nothing heady about the format. It’s just two people on a boat—and yes, we’re living our best lives out here. I’m sure some of you have hung on every word and photo in these missives and wish you were here, but I find myself wanting something more for this space. What I have been contributing here is nothing more than “we went here and ate this”; there is nothing inherently interesting about that unless this is a lifestyle you aspire to, and to those people I say, “Do it. This is fun.”

As I begin typing, we are underway southbound on Florida’s west coast Intracoastal Waterway, headed toward Treasure Island. We’ve been most of a week getting here. It only feels like a month.

Saturday, January 3, we remained in Bayou Cinco in Fort Walton Beach. Went ashore in L’il Stinker and dined on gumbo and jambalaya at Soul Cafe & Lounge, a Creole/Soul Food joint where we were waited on by the recently jilted-if-loquacious bartender, Anita who was certainly entertaining, but she did somehow misread our astonished looks as enrapturement. Truly we were overwhelmed by her persistence, using us as an audience for her endless stories about her ex, winning a recent bartending award, and how her most recent calling is that of dessert queen. Alas, we had other plans for our sweet tooth and never got to find out if her confections were “all that.” During our dinner, the sky did open up for a big, short shower that was blessedly finished with a vibrant rainbow outside the window about the time the check came. Taking this as our cue, we made a hasty exit.

We then walked to Beignets & Brew for an appropriate New Orleansian dessert. I’m surprised those two joints don’t collaborate somehow. They served it with a “butter cream” dipping sauce which was somehow simultaneously delicious, unnecessary, and spot on. With our clothing completely covered in powdered sugar, we stepped into the vibrant sunshine again to make our way back to the dinghy to bail and return to Stinkpot well before dark. I decked the tender with intentions of making an early escape toward Panama City in the morning. We settled in.

Sunday morning I rose with the dawn and put the coffee on. Hot cups in hand, we weighed anchor and began a long day’s cruise that finished in a lovely anchorage west of Panama City. We dined aboard inauspiciously on salad and grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches as the sun set and the recently-full moon rose photogenically on opposite sides of the creek.
​
Another morning, another hot cup of coffee, another ritual weighing of the anchor—Monday started off foggy and had us proceeding into Panama City with our automated fog signal blaring. Soon the fog gave way to a beautiful sunny morning and saw us making good progress toward the Apalachicola/Carrabelle area from where “the crossing” is begun for most southing recreational vessels like ours. Opting to stop before the sun dipped below the trees, we anchored for the night just beyond White City—not far from Port St. Joe—in a small oxbow where we dined well on roast chicken breast (bone in) with a kale/potato hash.

Tuesday had us up with the dawn, and we dawdled a bit, but only barely. Before long, we were underway toward Apalachicola, which we passed through around 9AM as we pressed on to Carrabelle, which also wasn’t our final destination for the day. After transiting from Apalachicola to Carrabelle, we docked at the Moorings’ fuel dock for 160 gallons of fuel, freshwater top off (we had a ¼ tank left), and a poo pump out. They had some air leaks in the pump out hose, so it took a while for that final situation to be solved. Once Stinkpot’s needs were met, we pointed her back down the river and anchored by Dog Island in preparation for our “crossing” of the Gulf from there to Clearwater or so. In the slow-cooker bubbled two more chicken breasts for most of the day. Once anchored, I served them over rice with sautéed julienned cabbage. While transiting Apalachicola, we crossed into the Eastern Timezone, so our schedules were a bit skewed, but we still managed to drift off on the early side, awaking around 7AM. Awake and sipping coffee we got underway around 9AM bound for Clearwater.

We slipped lines from Columbus Marina just before 7:00AM on Tuesday, December 16, the rising sun bright and low enough to make us squint while the 25°F chill did its best to infiltrate the pilothouse and the generator did its best to keep our heat working. Stennis Lock came up almost immediately, fully prepped thanks to a heads-up from our dock neighbor, Tick-Tock, who clearly enjoys being helpful—or at least demonstrating that their VHF skills are on point. As the sun climbed and the day settled in, the salon finally began to warm, coaxing the thermometer to a balmy 56°F and convincing us that shutting down the generator wasn’t entirely reckless. We cruised through Bevill Lock together—a tiny convoy of two—until nearing Heflin Lock, where Tick-Tock pressed on, and we chose the quiet charm of an oxbow to anchor for the evening. By 3:17PM, the hook was down near Warsaw Bar, and leftover “freezer chili” bubbled on the hob, proving that sometimes happiness really can be reheated.

Wednesday morning, we weighed anchor just after 7:30AM, slipping Stinkpot carefully back into the gentle flow of the Tenn-Tom. About an hour later, we were approaching Heflin Lock, arriving just behind a barge tow that had cleared the lock about thirty minutes prior. The lockmaster’s loquacious and effusively cheerful VHF holiday greetings and lock instructions sent Stacey on a brief emotional rollercoaster while she tended the lines and fenders. She could not hear the transmission, but she knew one was happening, and she was convinced by the length and rising intonation she could barely hear through the side of the boat that something was terribly wrong. Fortunately, it was just a southerner who was excited Christmas was coming, but learning that did nothing for her pumping adrenaline. I reassured her as the water dropped under the boat, and the lock’s gates were open by 9:10AM. We spent the rest of the day southing toward Demopolis, the river offering calm waters, occasional bird sightings, and an unobtrusive sense of time. Just before the lock in Demopolis, we turned off the river into Foscue Creek and dropped anchor just beyond the Coast Guard station at about 3:30PM, celebrating with BLTs on homemade sourdough, watching the light mellow across the river while feeling that rare satisfaction of an easy day done well. If only they could all be so smooth and frictionless.

The following morning found us underway again just after sunrise, mindful that this stretch of river offers few stopping points and that daylight is, in December, fleeting. Edna-2, our old favorite anchorage from the Great Loop, no longer held the same appeal—its protective green buoy missing, shoaling encroaching like a bad neighbor. We pressed onward and, around 2:00PM, dropped the hook at Barron’s Landing, near the long-gone Lock Number 2. The wind, initially from the south, nudged us gently against the half-knot current. As anticipated, it swung northwest, leaving us mere feet from fallen trees at the stern, an accidental demonstration of either skill or luck—or perhaps a carefully orchestrated combination of both. By nightfall, the wind settled entirely, and we drifted off to sleep in untroubled calm.

Friday’s run was shorter than we had hoped it would be. We had been underway before 7:00AM and ran almost to Coffeeville Lock, only to find stacked commercial traffic would occupy it until after sundown. Rather than commit to a night run, we backtracked to Okatuppa Creek, anchoring in the “alternative” anchorage across the river, where the hook was down by 1:40PM in a spot generous enough for Stinkpot to swing freely. Dinner was a comforting mash-up of savory roasted chicken thighs and green bean casserole.

With the sting of being turned around by a barge tow parade still fresh in our minds, we got underway Saturday before sunrise, around 6:30AM, greeted by sea smoke curling from the river. Rounding a bend, the pretty swirls and wisps of steam rising off the river gave way to a full-on wall of fog. Slowing to nearly nothing, we relied on GPS and AIS for guidance, eventually reaching Coffeeville Lock as a tow was completing an up-bound lockage. Passing into the lock in his wake, we made fast to a floating bollard at 7:49AM; we were downriver by 8:08AM and finally in waters that could be called tidally influenced for our first time aboard this boat—sea level. The day stretched long, the anchorages sparse. We even briefly went aground trying to get into what was, at one time, a well-regarded anchorage. Finally, at Alabama River Cutoff, where the mild current held us exactly where we wanted to be, we had the hook down for the day.

We've been here for a week, and we're staying another two nights at not inconsequential expense. Not because we want to. We'd much rather get moving. We decided to extend our stay here at the Columbus Marina because overnight temperatures are dropping into the teens and twenties for the next two nights. As I'm writing this on Sunday, December 14, the sun is setting, the wind is blowing 17 MPH, and it's 34°F and dropping to an expected overnight low of 19°F. This is probably not the best night to sever our connection to utilities. So despite having been here a week (at the weekly rate), we trudged back to the marina office and bought two more days at the daily rate (Columbus Marina unapologetically charges the daily rate if you add on to a week's stay—we could literally pay an extra $10 and stay for a full month, but we don't really want to remain past the cold snap). 

I confess that I'm writing this immediately on the heels of our most recent edition going live. I'm going to try making my missives more manageable to see if I can do a better job of getting them together in a timely way—the last one encompassed a month or more and required me to order and caption over 50 photos after selecting them from a sea of hundreds. Continuous cruising has a way of turning this blog into a near-relentless task, so in an effort to simplify the production, I'm going to try to change up my methods before I scream Uncle and give up altogether in a fit of pique. 

​So how did we get here to Columbus? Wednesday, December 3, we left Decatur, AL as expected. We locked down at Wheeler Lock and continued to Wilson Lock, but once there we were told we would not be able to lock through for a couple hours while a barge tow was locked through. Daylight was fast coming to an end, so while we were offered a spot to tie up outside the lock to wait, we generally avoid operating after dark. With the daylight fading, I tried turning on our navigation lights that we would be needing to continue after dark; the circuit breaker immediately kicked, indicating the presence of a short circuit somewhere in the system's wiring. Gah!

Since operating after dark without working navigation lights is dangerous and illegal, we immediately needed another plan. All this was coming to a head while I was also communicating on the VHF with a nearby barge tow to avoid playing a dangerous round of chicken while our plans were in flux. We made our way to a nearby cove suggested by the tow captain to anchor, but found the water to be prohibitively deep. Looking at the charts, all of the reasonable anchoring spots in the area were in very deep water—over 60 feet deep! We made a Hail Mary phone call to Steenson Hollow Marina on the opposite shore of the lake and within minutes had a dock reservation with good power for the (chilly) night. We pulled in as the sun was setting, tied up, powered up, and gratefully paid the man. It was a cute little marina in an adorable setting. We settled in for the night, exhausted, and scarcely stepped off the boat.

Thursday morning we got underway early, were quickly locked down, buzzed past Florence into Pickwick Lake. It was a damp, cold, overcast, dark day—the kind of day I usually would be using our navigation lights. I felt very self-conscious about not having them, but it couldn't be helped. They are not legally required between sunrise and sunset unless visibility is limited, and while it was dreary and a bit dark, visibility was adequate. We settled in at anchor about an hour before the sun would've set, if it had showed itself. Our anchor light was working flawlessly, despite being on the same breaker as the navigation lights (a clue!). 

Friday we weighed anchor just after 9:30AM and started making way south to the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway (Tenn-Tom). We nearly ran the daylight out, anchoring just after 3PM on Bay Springs Lake, just before the John Whitten Lock, the first lock on the canal. Saturday saw us up, at 'em, and through the lock early, weighing anchor just before 7AM and joining two other boats—a DeFever 44+5 sister ship called Sea Cow, and a 40' Carver called I Swear—for a long run at a handful of locks. Once again, we ran the daylight out, anchoring around 4PM just off the river. 

At 9AM last Sunday, we weighed anchor and ran the final gauntlet to bring us here, arriving a bit after 2PM. This really felt like a necessary stop with all the gremlins that were creeping out of every crevice and crack in the boat.

Since we've been here, I have isolated and bypassed the short circuit in the navigation lights—partially rewiring and relighting (with new, brighter bulbs of the correct color temperature) all the navigation lights, replaced the courtesy light over the sundeck (a required temporary workaround to get the stern light working after isolating the short to the stern light run). I re-plumbed the raw-water anchor wash-down so that it did not use copper pipe (which saltwater would corrode through) and rededicated the copper run to a freshwater wash-down, as originally designed. I put weather stripping on the pilothouse doors and the salon door to help keep us warm when it's cold, and greased the door slides. I replaced the rusted, frayed steel cable on our dinghy davit crane with Dyneema-type line (rope). I added a voltage-sensitive relay (VSR) to support proper charging and prevent improper discharging and premature battery aging—and topped all the batteries with distilled water. I have one other semi-major undertaking I'm hoping to pin down before we drop lines, but rather than jinx it by adding it to this enumeration, I'll leave the description of that less-than-savory upgrade for another scintillating Captain's Log. ​

These blog updates always seem to come together over the course of days and even weeks, and often, by the time I finish them, the original context—and even the opening sentences—no longer seem to properly precede what comes next. Such is the case with this one. We are currently in Decatur, AL, on our way back down the Tennessee River on the very same dock in Decatur we will stay at a mere two paragraphs hence in this missive. All this following an amazing few weeks of travel by water and by car, and a solid week of enjoying ourselves in Chattanooga. We stopped here for the night and ended up spending an extra day to wait out nature’s chilly bluster—and as I record these words on Tuesday, December 2, we are huddling inside Stinkpot while the 20-amp receptacle 130 feet from the dock is providing just enough electricity to keep us warm while the temperature descends into the 20s tonight (that’s Fahrenheit for our foreign friends). Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, which is one reason Stinkpot carries no cannon.

When last I scribed here, we were in Florence, Alabama. We left there on a lovely Thursday morning, locking up to Wilson Lake almost immediately. We ran the length of the lake, and Wheeler Lock told us we’d need to wait about an hour for a barge tow to lock down, so we anchored behind some mooring cells near the lock around noon. The tow emerged from the lock at around 12:40 PM, and we weighed anchor and moved into the chamber. Within 30 minutes, we were on Wheeler Lake. We made our way to Wheeler State Park and anchored just beyond the marina for the night. It was a gorgeous setting.

We are on the Tennessee River, heading ultimately for Chattanooga. Since leaving Nashville, we have had some amazing cruising. Our first day out, running back down the Cumberland River, we made it a long day. We locked back down at Cheatham Lock, and returned to the city dock in Clarksville. We determined we might have missed a good restaurant or two on our previous pass, and we were right. No sooner did we pull alongside the dock, we were met by Mike and Brandi, who helped us get our lines on the cleats, and in chatting on their Carver, they confirmed having had an exquisite meal at The Mailroom up the hill. With that in mind, we walked to the commissary in question and, too, had a lovely meal of selections off their appetizer menu.