Water We Thinking

When we spring ahead and change to daylight savings time here in Illinois it gives us an extra hour of sunshine in the evening.  Through the winter the sun sets as early as 4:30PM and working normal hours makes it tough to get home before dark.  Now that we are experiencing the longer days it is getting obvious why we live on a boat.  Spending time on the back deck with a cocktail in hand after a stressful day is about the best thing you can ask for. With the sun warming the still wrapped Cygnet it gets awfully warm inside and our mornings are spent figuring out a heating solution for the day.  With five electric space heaters going we keep the boat warm inside when the temps are well below freezing, but when the temperature hits the 50s it's tougher to figure out how much heat is enough.  Sunny days and mild winds mean Cygnet can get well above 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32.2C) inside with two heaters on low, but a breezy day and clouds mean two heaters might not...

Woke up this morning to this. The inside should be bright orange, not charred. The new SmartPlugs are now DumbPlugs.  Here we are again without power mid-January.  The most interesting thing is that the plug in the middle wasn't actually plugged into power, we'd unplugged it a few weeks ago.  These inlets also have a thermostat that is supposed to shut the power down if there is too much resistance to avoid these problems.  We also were running a very light load last night, not pulling many amps since it has been unseasonably mild and we have heaters powered through other cords. We did have a thunderstorm last night, with some nearby lightning (super-rare for Chicago in January) but we see no signs of a lightning strike anywhere.  All the pedestals, where the power comes from, are fine and the cords are fine on the other ends.  The inlets are also covered from the rain, so it isn't a water issue.  We talked to SmartPlug this morning and they s...

Nope, not moving to Florida. Chicago has hit us with some cold weather pretty early this year with December temperatures below zero Fahrenheit (-20C) and now January is doing the same thing.  Our first winter aboard Cygnet was 2014/15 and we had one of the toughest winters in Chicago history.  We survived on Cygnet and thought if we can tough it out through that one we'd be good.  Well here we are not halfway through 2016/17 and we are having to tough it out again.  When December's cold days hit we hadn't wrapped the boat yet and it was cold.  Now the boat is wrapped tightly and we are still cold.  One reason is because we are missing a window. Temporary window This past Spring we had our mechanic (well, our ex-mechanic as you'll learn) doing a bunch of work for us, number one being a six month! rebuild of our generator.  He assured us he could also fix a glass window on Cygnet that was missing and the previous owner had replaced with a pl...

Rather than write a bunch of crap that nobody cares about we've tried to be selective in what we post. Sometimes it takes us weeks or even months to come up with a good post.  Sorry we don't communicate more often, but after two and a half years living aboard Cygnet things are starting to become pretty routine.  Right now fall is upon us and we are getting prepared for the winter.  We've been fortunate this year in that the weather has been quite amazing with mostly sunny days and very mild temperatures.  Here it is November 7th and the high is 70F (21C) with not a cloud in the sky. Amazing for Chicago in November.  Sure it can get that warm at this time of year, but it has been like this for weeks! Colette waves hello on a beautiful day. Some of you might notice we've started to put metric measurements for distance and temperature in the posts.  For those of you who think you might be the only ones reading this little blog you should know that we hav...

The summer has been full of wonderful adventures aboard Cygnet.  This past weekend we decided to do what we've talked about for two years and other people have asked us about a lot.  We decided to take Cygnet across the lake to St. Joseph, Michigan.  We aren't the first, this is a pretty common thing for people to do, but we've always stayed close to home and this was our first time being more than a few miles off shore.  Cygnet seems to have made the trip before based on the memories in her GPS unit, but it was a first for us and we are pretty excited about it. Excitement! We'd been invited to a wedding that was to take place in St. Joseph on Saturday and thought it was the perfect excuse and time of year (early September) to take a journey across.  There were a lot of unknowns to us, which we'll get into in a bit, but we decided that we'd go for it - weather depending.  First we were confident that Cygnet's engines were up to the task, after some fi...

We're often asked if we take the boat out.  Since we live on it some people assume that the boat never moves, it's permanently tied to the dock.  Some people wonder if we go to Michigan every weekend.  Some people don't think we can go anywhere since they don't realize the Chicago River (or the Great Lakes for that matter) go anywhere.  Some people, we swear multiple people have asked this, ask if we take it to Europe/ the Caribbean/ California a lot.  Sure, we'd love to take it to the Greek Islands, but the only Greek Islands we visit are located on Halsted St. in Chicago.  We often feel bad when we say we took the boat out only nine times last summer.  So many people use their boats every week or many times per week, like some neighbors we have at River City.  A middle aged couple we've never met takes their boat out almost every night!  The two of them go out for a short river cruise and are often back 45-90 minutes later.  We love t...

We are getting there.  We have a lot of projects going on as we mentioned in the last blog and now a couple are finally complete!  Yesterday we had S Squared Cabinetry & Remodeling aboard Cygnet finishing the multiple jobs we had for them.  Our dishwasher install, our lower helm removal, our new bar cabinet, and the shoe cabinet.  Let's take a look at what they did. We are now living in the 20th century!  Cygnet has two bathrooms with showers, a washer/dryer, a full size fridge, but no dishwasher.  The rationale we suppose was that you often use disposable plates and utensils when out for a day on the boat.  We do use disposables when we have a party (our inner tree huggers cry a little) but on a day to day basis we use real plates, silverware, and glasses.  For the last two years we've been washing by hand, something Kevin hates after slicing his right index finger open washing a glass eight years ago, and it seems like there is always a pi...