Good weather again today in Fisherman Bay on Lopez Island. Rowed ashore to take showers at the resort. They charged us $6 each to use the services ashore. Sounded OK to me until we made it in and there was a $2 per 6 minute shower. We could have just ditched their showers and headed downtown to use the free ones that the Chamber of Commerce offers, but I was already $12 in the hole – why not go all the way? At the end of it we spent $18 on showers that day. That’s a lot of cruising kitty (cash) just to wash up. Natalie was ready to put a shower on the boat after that experience.

We dropped our shower stuff in the dinghy and rolled downtown to Lopez Village to see what was open. Pretty much it’s a cute little island town. There’s a fudge shop, coffee shop, winery and organic grocery store. We grabbed some ice and a few other necessities (s’mores anyone?) from the regular grocery store and headed back to the boat. We motored out against the current headed for Deer Bay.

The trip to Deer Bay wasn’t anything to brag about. Wind on the nose so we just motored through, recharging the batteries. Keeping the batteries full is our biggest worry out here after weather. All the nice things on airborne need electricity. If we want the kerosene heater to work, we need power for the kerosene pump. If we want to see at night, we can use the kerosene lantern. Unfortunately it doesn’t throw much light for reading, so we burn electric lights. The anchor light uses electricity too, so if we want to stay legal at night when we’re anchored, that needs to be lit. Our propane stove has an electric solenoid and safety sniffers to keep us from blowing up if there’s a leak.  Yup.  That uses electricity too.  Other nice stuff we have on board that uses electricity are the GPS, laptops and the radio. Keeping the batteries topped up makes life easier.

We have one smaller battery that’s used for starting the engine and another larger “house battery” that’s used for the rest of our electrical needs. We run off the house battery all night, and if it dies there’s no problem. In the morning we can switch over to the other battery, start the engine and then run it for a while to charge up the house battery for another night.

We arrived at Deer Harbor, dropped the anchor in about 30 feet of water and I fired up the grill for burgers. After the dishes were done I turned on the kerosene heater, lit the lantern and Natalie and I practiced songs on our guitars. We sang the Eagles, CCR and country songs until my fingers hurt too much from playing and we turned in for the night.