Water We Thinking

Recently we were invited to be interviewed for a local podcast called Your Chicago.  Your Chicago showcases different people and organizations around our great city that make it the amazing place we all love to live in or visit.  They post an episode about every other week and today ours went live! They are currently only setup to interview one person at a time, so Kevin's handsome voice is missing from the show, but you get to hear from Co-captain Colette and hosts Arden Joy and Stefania. Followers of Your Chicago come solely by word of mouth, so head please spread the word after you listen to the show. Listen here.

When around boats you can always find something to fix.  There are many things that we want to replace, repair, upgrade, etc.  But often we have things that take priority, as you've read in this blog previously.  This time it's the water.  As we wrote in our "Power Hungry and All Wet"  post we had a leak at a T fitting that runs the fresh water throughout the boat.  We applied more and more epoxy to fix the leak since we couldn't reach it in the tiny space it was located.  We fixed the problem, or so we thought, until about 45 days ago. Colette is the thin one, so she gets this task. We noticed lately the fresh water pump running a bit more than it should so we investigated.  We're unsure if it's due to the pipes getting colder and shrinking or just due to age or pressure but our leak has reappeared.  Kevin tried to epoxy it again, but to no avail.  The T itself is about the size of two Sharpie markers intersecting (and the same co...

Let's face it, winter in Chicago isn't the greatest. Here we are about 40 days away from spring and it's a cold week with little end in sight. We've insulated and sealed as much as we can but it's still cooler than we wish inside Cygnet. We now have four space heaters running on two different circuits and the reverse cycle air conditioners are no longer effective. When we get a sunny day without much wind it can be 78 degrees inside! But when the wind kicks up over a couple cloudy days and the exterior temperature drops we have a less comfortable temperature.  Even after those sunny days it can be in the mid 60s in the salon of our boat by the next morning. We rarely get below 63 but there have been a couple very cold nights we've touched the 50s. We don't expect to be hot inside, we used to keep our house around 68 daytime and 62 nighttime, but we want to be comfortable.  We found a very interesting solution to those cold nights. We purchased a bioethanol...

First we must apologize for not blogging in a little while, we've both been relatively busy with work (Colette especially) and just plain lazy about writing. On January 17 we spent four hours working the River City booth at the Boat Show .  We did the 10-2 shift which gave us some time afterward to explore the show with our good friends Adam and Holly and their lovely daughter Claire.  In the beginning it was a bit slow, but quickly it filled up and we grabbed people walking through to talk about River City.  Now, let me say that River City isn't perfect, it has some problems here and there, but overall we really like it.  Mostly we like the location and the fact that you can liveaboard year round.  So we put on our happy faces and told people about our "neighborhood." If you were one of the people that stopped by I hope you gained some great information from us and learned more about the marina, if you didn't make it that's too bad because we had a gr...