Life On The Boat

Many aspects of living on a boat are just like living in a house.  I mean we still have to cook, and clean, and just as there is routine home maintenance the same is true for maintenance on board.  It's just that sometimes these tasks are different on a boat than on shore.

As an example, our refrigerator does not have an ice maker - it also is not "frost-free", but that's a topic for another day.  Some boats have an snazzy ice maker/freezer installed, Lauren Grace does not.  We like ice in our drinks - tea, soda, water, rum.  The solution to this has been a portable, counter-top style ice-maker that makes ice but does not store it or keep it frozen.  We simply empty the basket and transfer the nice cubes to the freezer section of our fridge.  This has worked very well for us - until today when the ice maker failed to produce those magic cubes.  Yep, we have a problem.

Larry, who can fix nearly anything, investigated and determined that the muffin fan which carries hot air off of the condenser had quit turning.  Fortunately we were still at Vero Beach, or as I sometimes think of it, cruiser heaven.  Also fortunately, we discovered this Friday evening and the bus runs on Saturday - only part of a day, but it runs.  I remembered that there was a Radio Shack near the grocery and a phone call Saturday morning confirmed that they had a fan of the size and voltage we needed. Into the dinghy, and off to the bus stop and in a while we had a new fan.

Not just any fan, this one also has a light; yes, a plain fan probably would have been less expensive, but they did not have a plain version in stock.  Yes, they could order one for us; no, we did not intend to wait for it to arrive. 

Back aboard, an hour or so of tinkering and we have light!  And ice cubes!  Come to find out that these fans are very sought after by some computer geek types who replace the plain fans with these spiffy lighted versions; yes they are available in different colors, if you want to order them.  Hmmm, we must be really behind the technology curve here, we didn't have any idea such a product existed....and we still can't figure out why anyone would take a perfectly functional fan out of any device and replace it...could it be we are so out of touch, I wonder... or maybe we're just cheap.  I'll tell you a secret though, Larry does enjoy looking at this little wonder and he never fails to marvel at it when he passes by.  He keeps saying "I can't believe it's blue".