Whitehall Bay, MD

[Kevin's Post] It's 5pm here and 100 degrees in the cockpit of the boat according to our indoor/outdoor thermometer. We've been trying to hold off running the genset/air conditioning until we can't stand it anymore. Today we made it until 3 pm when it was 93 inside the boat and about 96 outside. We still don't really trust the genset, so we are very careful about running it. We try to keep the load and runtime to a minimum. But, we've still been running it 6-8 hours a day for about the past week just to keep conditions on the boat tolerable. If we didn't have a cat onboard, it wouldn't really be a problem, we could just leave the boat and forget about it. But with the cat, we need to keep the boat reasonably cool at all times. The genset seems to be fairly stable as long as we keep the load under 20 amps, or about half the rated capacity. Higher than that one of three things will happen: A) the diesel engine part of the genset will overheat and shut down the genset, B) the generator will overheat and shut down the genset, C) the vacuum of the fuel pump will suck enough air in through a leak in the fuel filter assembly to shut the genset down. We've run about 50 hours without B or C happening, but A has happened a couple of times because we pushed the load up to 25 amps. The 20 amp limit means we can run either one of our two air conditioning units, but not both. Fortunately, the boat is pretty comfortable with just one running. Boris sleeps right on top of the AC vent.

Today I spent most of the day looking through all the marinas in the northern Chesapeake trying to find one where we might be able to escape the heat for a few days without breaking the bank. Surprisingly, there are some pretty good deals to be had once you get outside of the major tourist spots. We've been waffling back and forth about whether to continue north to get out of the heat or just wait it out here. The Chesapeake is a bit hotter than we expected it be. The boat is pretty comfortable until the outside temp gets above around 85, above that you either have to run the AC or sweat. New England last summer was great, so we hadn't really figured out what our temperature limits were. We thought about going up to New England for the rest of the summer, but it is about 600 miles round trip from here. Going there would mean about a week of travel time each way, plus waiting for a weather window each way, and we are thinking that it is too late in the year to justify it. Plus, 600 miles on the boat means fuel expenses, maintenance expenses (something breaks every day, but less often when you are laying in the bunk reading), and various other wear and tear expenses.

It's too hot to go outside and take a picture, so here is one from last summer that we never posted. It was taken by a helicopter. God only knows why we had a reef in the main.