I'm due to make a final trip to Thanks Sweetie to finalize my owner's winter preparation. I've hauled off all the linens, towels, and dumped all the food and liquids that weren't worth keeping, and the only thing left is removing the wet towels holding the water from defrosting the fridge. I'll leave two large tubs of damp rid for the marina guys to open when shrinking the boat, and then it's just counting the days until spring again.
This season was pretty remarkably hassle-free. The Vacu-flush system worked all summer without any issues (besides a little smell from the vent), and no other systems gave me trouble. I did have a mystery problem at the end of the summer with the electric grill blowing it's fuse, but upon disassembly and tightening electrical connections it started working again. I had thought maybe the element was cracked, but it wasn't.
I got out a lot during the week this summer, which is really the most magical time because of the glow of sunset. It was also fun to be out with friends and not my family, a "guy's night" if you will.
We made it to Lord Fletcher's 3 times this summer, with no docking problems -- thankfully we had dock boys to help each time, but my close handling skills seem to also have improved a lot. We struck out once when we wanted to go because it was packed and there was an hour wait, but really the only loss there is not spending $100 on bar food.
I also did probably a "record" amount of on-plane running this summer. It's kind of amazing how much smaller the lake is when you can run at 30 mph instead of 8-9 mph. It feels more than 3x faster. It uses a crazy amount of gas, and we're out $1600 for about 300 gallons of fuel consumption this summer.
But in many ways, after 7 years of boating on Minnetonka, the lake has shrunk from experience, too. The north half is kind of gross for swimming (relatively speaking), except maybe in Maxwell Bay and Crystal Bay. Crystal, though, is a bit of a runway for traffic from Coffee Cove to the Arcola Bridge, so other than the NE corner, not exactly great anchorage. But really the lake has lost some of the mystery it once had.
We *still* haven't done an overnight on the water, something I still want to do. It's a ton of compromises, from needing to run the generator for several hours (and all the noise) to killing the fridges for the night so we don't lose the port battery array.
On the subject of the port array, which runs house power, I think we're getting to the end of those batteries. I haven't had a start failure, but I did have a fairly weak-sounding crank after about 4 hours at anchor with the stereo system running loud. The stereo sucks a lot of power, so that may have been a bigger issue. I'm already noodling what's involved in replacing those batteries and how much larger I can go in terms of AGM cells and still fit the battery tray footprint.
