Where it all began

We are anchored in the Herb River, just off the Wilmington, in Savannah, Georgia (map). We're just a mile from our afternoon destination of Thunderbolt Marina. This is where our boating life began, a little over six years ago.

From this spot we can see the place where we bought Vector, at Thunderbolt Marine, and also the marina where we moved aboard, Hogan's. It was a short trip between the two, but we had to have John (the seller) captain the boat for the trip; we were so green that the insurance company would not let us operate the boat without a licensed captain aboard.


Sunset over Thunderbolt Marine, from our anchorage. We first saw Vector just to the right of the large shed.

We were at Hogan's for a month, moving stuff off the bus and onto the boat. And when we were almost ready to leave... we ended up right back at Thunderbolt Marine to replace the bow thruster, which gave up the ghost as we were heading to the pumpout dock with yet another licensed captain aboard. He was a single-screw shrimp boat skipper and we were very glad to have him when the thruster quit.

We had a relaxing morning yesterday near Ossabaw Sound, with the favorable tide not starting until mid-day. I updated the blog and got a few things put away, but otherwise took a little break from projects. We had a very nice cruise through the low country of Georgia in the afternoon, passing Isle of Hope, Skidaway, and Whitemarsh islands, among a slew of smaller and sometimes exclusive ones.

We had the hook down here early enough for me to resume work, and I spent the rest of the afternoon and into the evening getting the new four-port serial adapter installed. I am very happy to report that it is working just fine, so the garbled port issue was specific to the other adapter. I've packed that one back up and it will be returned to Amazon. Even though there is a dockside tapas restaurant at the end of this creek, we elected to stay aboard and grill up a nice pork tenderloin for dinner.

After dinner I packed up the adapter and printed the Amazon-provided return label. There were streaks in the bar code, which can be a problem, so I printed it again. And again. And again, after several rounds of print-head cleaning. No joy. So I pulled out my syringe and cleaning fluid to clean the ink delivery passages.

That didn't help much, either, and, worse, in the process of manually moving the print-head for cleaning, something got off-track and now the printer does not work at all. I am sure that if I spent a couple of hours taking it apart I will find what tiny part is off-index with what other part of the drive system, and then I can spend another hour pumping cleaner through the heads, all to get another year out of it. But really, we paid just $50 for this printer nearly eight years ago, while we were still on the bus (to replace another printer that crapped out). It doesn't owe us anything, and last night I had just used the very last of our ink cartridge stash.

Considering we will be at a dock this afternoon and we already have a rental car booked, this is a perfect time to just run down to Best Buy and drop another fifty bucks on a new printer. They'll even recycle the old one for us. We'll be back to printing shipping labels by this evening.

In addition to Best Buy, we have a few other errands to run while we have a car, and then we'll drive back down to Richmond Hill for dinner. The car is due back in the morning, and after returning it we will shove off and continue north. I don't expect to have time to blog while we're in Thunderbolt, so our next update will be under way or from another anchorage.