Friday

But it's a motor boat!

Gretchen and I went to Danville about 10 days ago to pick up our new boat, and guess what, it has a motor! Indeed, we have made the transition from sailing to motoring boating. It's a Key West 1720 and we are looking forward to using it on SML and continuing our exploration of coastal waters!

The dealer gave us a good orientation and then we trailed her to SML. It was too late in the afternoon to go for a test drive so we made plans to do that in the morning.

Friday dawned clear, warm and calm....a good day for motor boating! Calm and boating....getting used to that concept will take some time! The motor break-in schedule called for one hour of motoring at 2000 rpm or less with a second hour of getting the boat up on a plane and then backing off on the rpms. Half way through the second hour, we picked up Jenny and Jeff and went out for a ride. I told Jeff everything seemed fine but the speedometer didn't seem to be working. But.....then we got the boat up on a plane and the speedometer worked! In the first hour we had not gone above 10 mph, the minimum speed registered. The quote of the day came from Gretchen with less than two hours traveling in our new boat. She declared to her sister, "Motor boating is much better than sailing!" Then Gretchen put 40 years of sailing behind her by taking the helm and brining the boat up on a long, long, fast plane!

Born to plane!

After our first two weeks as motor boaters, we know we made the right decision transitioning from sailing to motor boating. We will get a lot more use out of our Key West and see a lot more sights than we would if we kept SunShower. Plus, SunShower was sold last week....as quickly as we could have anticipated!

Key West 1720

 

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