You Don’t Know What You Got Til It’s Gone

Left Pickwick State Park after the retreat on 5/16. Since then I have gotten as far as Goose Pond Marina in Scottsboro Alabama but not without problems. Getting ready to leave the park I noticed the battery meter was low. I checked the batteries with a tester and they were in fact low. I thought I had some bad batteries. I knew these would give out eventually but I was hoping they would last in to at least July.

Behold, not the batteries at all but a burnt out on board charger. Not good news at all. In my infinite wisdom I thought well temporarily I will buy a regular charger and charge the batteries each day and limp along conserving power on the fridge, pump and so forth until I had the money to get a new on board charger.

First I wanted to know if the charger could be repaired and what went wrong. This began my education in 12 volt on board charger 101. I eventually found out that the charger I was using was built for a different boating lifestyle.

 These chargers are made to be used to charge batteries at rest. Some one brings back their boat after the day and plugs it in, or turns it on, and leaves. The the charger if used on my boat would charge my three batteries. As you might imagine I don’t stop and leave the boat. I use 12 volt power constantly on gauges, alarms, pumps and communication. The sport charger can’t handle this. The sport charger basically has a nervous breakdown and it ain’t pretty .

I use three series 29 batteries

and have about three hundred amp hours of power to use for 12 volt stuff. Well without getting technical to keep them charged with my little portable takes a lot of time. You have to put quite a bit more energy into a battery to gain back what you use. Thus it’d be a big pain in the behind as well

the fact I have to shut everything down to charge.

So, long story short I need a charger that allows the batteries to charge while being used. I need a charger that can over ride the batteries and provide its power directly.

Thus the three stage on board charger

“ And the answer is…”

$300 plus shipping for the charger. Most likely $300 for three mid level 29 batteries and the bonus is staying at a marina to do the installation and in fact go into a second month to have the money for both. Well It appears I will be staying in Alabama for awhile.

Will do the work and go see my sis. I will be going Greyhound. I just need to get to Chattanooga. A month in a marina is cheaper than a week. Just gotta find a place with good showers Laundromat and such.

Well other than that, “ How was the play Mrs. Lincoln?”

Had some good anchorages and stayed over the holidays at Joe Wheeler State Park. Joe Wheeler was an interesting man. Check him out. I command you.

Well here are some pics

This house boat does not get out much.

This is the Wilson lock. This lock is a 95 foot lift. Remember the J C Whitten lock at 85 feet. On the bottom right is a 50 foot houseboat. Wow!

Rain falling about 4.5 miles up river near Goose Pond.

Big wide expanses of river from Guntersville toward Goose Pond

This may not look like much but this where the Marshall Space center loaded rocket parts onto a special ship for river and ocean travel to send to Florida during the space program in the sixties. They had good batteries on board.

Well this is Dr. Brad standing by on 16 somewhere out here-

PS All colloquialisms are on purpose and so are any misspellings or grammatical errors. So there!

Hot as Hell…

Temperatures are in the 100’s for the weekend. The heat index at present is 107 degrees. However I have worked long enough to purchase  a Honda 200i Companion generator.

Isn’t she a beauty. This little puppy will run the AC , the whole shebang.

I also finally got my homemade 65 watt solar panel hooked up when I got this

8 amp controller

I have successfully charged my trolling motor battery as well as these two huge 6 volt batteries I have hooked up to make a humongous 12 volt battery with a couple of hundred amp hours. I am in the process of putting some serious electric in the aft cabin. I am also going to wire a switch to run the refrigerator and stay off the house batteries when I am out.  I even will run a small inverter to charge some electronics that can’t use 12 volt hookups.

I’ll tell you this. Below is the best gas can ever in the world, anyplace in the universe, bar none, swear to God, would walk over a dying nun to get sort of good.You can fill anything and it will not spill a drop. You put it straight up and down and fill the tank and it shuts itself off and sucks the gas in the nozzle back into the tank. This is some groovy stuff. Check these guys out on line

 

This June also brought out the bass tournaments. These guys where nothing like that sob I wrote about awhile back. They were serious down to earth pro types and real good amateurs. Boy howdy did these guys bring in the fish. One tournament had the big fish at 8.97 pounds. I have never seen a bass that big. Here are some pictures of one tourney.

And in the end let us not forget the penultimate fishing guy.

and the beauty of the river

By the way my phone crapped out and I lost all my contacts. I have nobody’s phone number. Send mail to doc-brad@hotmail.com and lay it on me if you still have the strength.

This is Dr. Brad standing by on 16 .