Batteries are heavy, fyi.

On Friday, the First Mate had an overnight sleep over party to attend.  That left the captain and I free of responsibilities.  We had planned on spending Saturday doing boat work, anyway, and I set about cleaning some of the carpets onboard.

Side note:  to hell with anyone who puts carpet in a boat.

Ahem.

Anyway, the captain joined me on board around 5:15 pm and we decided, spontaneously, that we would take her for an overnight cruise.  We got through the first bridge into alligator territory before we had a red wine spill (note:  red wine on white fiberglass constitutes an emergency.  Immediate deck swabbing had to happen, and did happen, by the admiral, no less, since the captain was driving.)

We got that all situated and we continued our trip, out into the lake, where we had to wait a minute for the train bridge.  This ended up with us navigating the end of our trip in the dark, which was awesome.  Our nav lights work great.

Seaward in the bayou

We intended to go to another marina in Slidell for the night, but we got distracted by a bar we passed that had live music playing.  We stopped in for a drink, and ended up staying until a half hour after it closed.  Whoops.  The owner gave us approval to stay on their dock overnight, so we did and we slept very well.  In the morning, tons of fishermen were going by us so we woke up really early.  Decided to cruise on back home, so we went to start 'er up, etc.

And nothing happened.  It seemed that someone (not naming names, Captain, but you know who you are) left the mains on, so the batteries were completely drained.  In his (ahem, or her, but really...) defense, it's a dumb setup, where you disengage your motors on the fly bridge but have to go down to the cabin to turn off the mains.  However, it's OUR dumb setup and we need to get used to it.  

My dad was the superhero who drove over, fetched us, helped us haul out our stupid dead batteries (which we knew would need to be replaced soon, anyway), and took us to our car.  We took the stupid dead batteries to Sam's Club and bought new ones, and then took them back over to the boat, where we sweet-talked and greased the palm of a 25 year old kid to help drop them back in the engine room.  Captain hooked us up and we were, finally, underway at around 11am.

The trip back to our slip was awesome because it was warm and the alligators came out.  We had to have seen at least 20 of them in the bayou.  And I drove some, too, in the lake.  Not in the bayou because there was a good bit of traffic, and it is narrow, and I am a chicken.

Got back to our spot and it was time to go meet up with the stranger non-killer from Craigslist whom I had contacted the day before about a magma grill he had for sale.  We bought the grill for $60 (SCORE) and it had all the parts and pieces except the little stick thingee that you fix to your boat.  Went to WestMarine for that (they do price matching now, y'all) and some propane, too.

Went home for a bit, collected the First Mate from his sleepover.  Took showers.  Started laundry.

Then we went back over to the slip, set up the grill and began to work on the non-functioning radar.  I climbed up on the cover on which the dinghy sits and was unscrewing the top casing on the radar antenna when my eye caught on a face in the water below me.  Our resident alligator, whom we call Al-J, had come to investigate the big noisy birds on top of the boat.

It was a fun day.  We spent $500, but we now have brand new batteries and a newfound respect for turning off the mains when you disengage the engines.  And we have a grill.

-Admiral Sarah