My last Windows Phone.
November 2019
This was a good phone until the battery life became very limited...a common problem with these phones.
For a very reasonable price this was a good phone with amazing battery life and an SD card slot.
All around good phone. No SD card slot and I wish it had more storage but I survived. That just means that I can't copy my whole music library onto the phone but I don't miss that too much. Eventually it did get pretty close to full with all the sailing navigation charts and things. And it caught a few raindrops one day, after which the USB-C charging port only worked in one orientation. That was very annoying until I marked my charging cables to know which way to insert them.
Things I've owned/used over the years--phones, computers, etc.
This is our "anchor watch" situation in an app called Aqua Map Marine. These tracks are since yesterday afternoon when the wind started blowing hard.
I positioned the anchor icon after anchoring so it is kind of a guess, but as we swing in arcs I can move it to the center of the arcs to be more accurate.
It goes off a couple times per night saying "BAD GPS ALERT, BAD GPS ALERT" which just means it has lost GPS signal. Usually it has figured it out by the time I wake up and pick up the phone, so that is annoying. Out bedroom is under the cockpit so it doesn't have great exposure to the sky. Fiberglass is pretty transparent to RF but there are some storage lockers with a lot of stuff in them and I bet the solar panels are good at blocking it.
The long straight lines are from when it gets an inaccurate reading, then a line is drawn back to our actual location as correct readings are put into what appears to be an averaging model. There is a time delay on the out-of-bounds alarm so I think only once has it actually alarmed when it is doing this behavior.
It runs in the background using the GPS continuously which uses up maybe 50% of the phone battery (Pixel 3A) in 8 hours.
This was an interesting read that significantly expanded my knowledge on wine. Yet it wasn't a clinical, textbook sort of read. For instance, there are a few chapters on specific wine making regions. These were interesting but it probably would have been a dry (pun) read if the whole book was a chapter on each region. But it mercifully moves on to the drama of wine critics and the finer points of hosting wine-tasting parties. A couple of the characters are very interesting and entertaining (one vintner that spouts one-liners non-stop) and the others are competently described.
Overall well written, enjoyable, and educational. I don't recall exactly what it was but something about the first chapter didn't enthuse me...I recommend that you keep reading.
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The new impeller worked well when I started up the engine in the morning so we motored a few hundred yards to the nearby fuel dock and filled up with 30 gallons of diesel. Then we took off motoring down the ICW. It was an easy day of me watching the autopilot do its thing while Anna and Louise stayed warm below, still trying to get over a cold too. I put the jib out a couple times to get a small speed boost but most of the time the wind conveniently shifted to always be on the nose.
We arrived in Oriental, NC about an hour before sunset and found a spot at the free dock there. It was nice to just hop off the boat and go for a little walk. Anna got ice cream that night and the next morning I tried to get a replacement shower handle at the marine store. They didn't have one but I got some fuel filters and oil. We had a late departure around 11:00am as it was only 24 miles to Beaufort, NC. This was a nice short trip, and even a little exciting when a very young deer swam across the channel just in front of the boat. We found a nice spot to anchor near the dinghy dock. There were some big winds coming the next day so it was nice to feel the anchor set really hard--a good yank. Hopefully it is not actually stuck on an obstruction!
We survived the windy afternoon and night and have been bumming around for a couple days. It has been cold! We figured out that the generator alone can run the climate control system (I was getting too fancy trying to run it through the inverter, sometimes you just have to try the simple things) so now we have some relief when the temperatures get extreme. One gallon of gas probably runs it for 4-5 hours so its pretty reasonable to run occasionally. One night it got down to 33 degrees, and then it was a high of 45 degrees yesterday. Now the weather appears to be stabilizing in the 50s which we have found to be pretty reasonable.
Today it really would have been good to sail "outside" (in the ocean versus in the ICW) to Wrightsville Beach as the weather was favorable, but I have a two-day cough and figured a long 12-hour day would not be good for my health. Plus it was really cold in the morning. So we stayed here and I went to town to get Louise's medication. I also found a laundry place so went back to the boat to get all the blankets and towels and got that done.
The next three days will be solid rain so we will be hunkered down. Good thing I got some good books at the book exchange in Belhaven! The rain is part of a crazy storm system that is brewing in north Florida and will move up the coast through the weekend. On Saturday the winds will build to 30 knots sustained and blow like that for about 24 hours where we are so that will be exciting. There is a lot of chatter on the cruising Facebook groups as the storm is hitting such a long segment of the coast and there are many people working their way south down the ICW like us at this time of year.
Maybe on Monday we will be on the move!
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