Moving along.

We are underway northbound on Delaware Bay, which means southbound (finally) on the ICW. You will be relieved to know it is a short update today, given I just posted on Friday, but I don't want to waste the opportunity to get an update out while we are in open water, lest I once again find myself scrambling to find the time. That said, now that we are making tracks, I should have more opportunities until we are "in the ditch" south of Norfolk.

Saturday morning the marina was kind enough to run us over to Enterprise, two towns north in Rio Grande, where we had our car and were on the road by 8:30. Our first stop was the AAA in Northfield, which is an Amazon counter, where Louise had a package waiting that we had expected to collect while we were in Atlantic City. From there we headed to our now-customary stop at JT's Bagels on our way to my dad's new digs in Toms River.

They had transported him from the hospital Friday evening, and we wanted to make sure he was settled and all his things made the trip with him. Even though one reason he had to come to this facility was for "isolation," we found him sitting partly upright in a rolling lounger in the day room. Every facility makes its own decisions about isolation protocol, and this one wanted to have him in full view of the nurses' station to mitigate fall risk and other issues, rather than out of sight in his room.

Ducks in a shop window along Washington Street, a pedestrian mall. Louise for scale.

He did not wake while we were there, so we just spent some time with his assigned nurse to brief/debrief the situation, opting to come back later after we finished our other errands. That included swinging by the other Amazon locker where I had two packages waiting, and dropping by the house to drop off some paperwork and to see if my mom needed anything. I was gobsmacked to find my long-lost second cousins over for a visit; I have not seen them in at least three decades. We only had time for a quick fly-by, as we needed to get back to the nursing facility, but it was great to catch up with them briefly, and for Louise to meet them.

Dad was able to wake briefly after we returned, and we determined that he was comfortable and not in any distress. We spent maybe a half hour and talked again with the nurse before leaving, knowing it might be a week or so before I can get back. We were satisfied with the standard of care we observed during the visit.

We were back in time to spend a few minutes at the boat before dinner, then headed into town. We ended up at the Blue Pig restaurant, in the historic Congress Hall hotel. The whole town was busy, even for a cold October weekend, and we had to circle to find parking. Even though online reservations were booked out to past 8pm, we were able to get a table as walk-ins at 5. In hindsight we should have gone downstairs to The Boiler Room, which was a bit more casual and lively. After dinner we strolled a couple of blocks of the Washington Street pedestrian mall, busy and decorated for the season.

One of our lithium batteries, on the dock. No, that is not a bullet hole.

With four hours of driving, visits, and our big night on the town, it had been a very long day, and we settled in for a relaxing evening. The outside temperature plummeted, heading for a low in the low 40s overnight, and we were maxing out our 30-amp shore connection, which we had chosen over our usual 50-amp to save another $53 on our stay. Sometime after 9pm the internal 30-amp breaker on the inverter popped for the first time ever (normally either the 30-amp output breaker or one of the 30-amp input breakers trips first).

The inverter is silent about doing this, and it merrily continued running all our heaters from the batteries until the low-battery alarm went off. I could not figure why the inverter was inverting and not charging, since the input power was fine. I opened up the battery compartment to look at the meters on each of the six batteries, which revealed they were seriously out of balance, with one showing zero bars. I went down and switched to the backup charger to get everything working. And that's when the magic smoke came out.

I'm very glad I had the cover off the battery compartment, because we noticed it right away. A stream of smoke accompanied by an acrid smell of burning plastic and electronics. Louise grabbed a fire extinguisher while I ran down to disconnect the charger and turn off the main battery switch. Fortunately, the burning stopped when I switched everything off. We opened the whole boat up to clear the smoke and the smell, which meant plugging into 50 amps so we could run the big heaters. The little ones can keep the boat comfortable when its all closed up, but are no match for 44° air flooding into the boat.

Scorch mark on the side of the battery compartment, in the saloon settee. This could easily have become a fire if we did not nip it in the bud.

I eventually found the tripped breaker, which pops out of the inverter like it's a turkey ready in the oven. Unfortunately, it appears there is no way to fashion an alarm to tell us this breaker has popped, so we have to just rely on the low battery alarm. And I disconnected the bad battery from the bank before turning everything back on. By this time it was nearly 11pm, and we thought long and hard about whether or not the battery needed to come off the boat before we turned in. Yes, of course it did.

I spent the next 20 minutes surgically excising it from the bank, and Louise walked it off the boat and all the way to the parking lot — we did not even want to leave it on the wooden dock. It did not ignite, and at the end of the day yesterday I brought it back aboard and set it in the middle of the foredeck, where a fire can't ignite anything. I need to hang onto it until Lion Energy answers my warranty claim; I really want to open it up and disconnect whatever smoked from the cells before I do anything else with it, but I can't until they talk to me. I do not have a theory about why the battery picked this time to fail.

Yesterday I ruminated about going back up to the nursing facility, since we already had a car. Enterprise is closed on Sunday, so we had to keep both the car and the marina until this morning. Ultimately we decided to take the day off; it would be a three-hour round trip to spend maybe fifteen minutes. Instead we had a quiet morning, and in the afternoon I took the car to run a bunch of errands, including a well-overdue haircut, a massage, and gassing up the car.

Closer view of the damage. I think the BMS is behind this spot.

In the evening we went back out to Lower Township (place names in this part of the state are weird) for dinner at the Red Brick Ale House. After dinner we hit the Acme supermarket a few doors down for our last easy provisions for the foreseeable future and then headed home to prepare for an early departure.

This morning I returned the car first thing. Enterprise here does not give rides on Monday morning so I had to Uber back to the boat. We dropped lines right at 9:30 for a fair tide the whole day. We had a very choppy ride across the easternmost part of the bay, but it got better when we were back in the lee around Egg Island Point. As I wrap up typing, abreast of the nuke plant, the plotter is projecting a 5pm arrival to the anchorage behind the Reedy Point dike.

If all goes to plan, we will transit the C&D Canal tomorrow with a fair tide, then head down the Elk River and Chesapeake Bay on Wednesday to Rock Creek, off the Patapsco, where we hope to catch up with friends Stacey and Dave aboard Stinkpot. I've also booked a couple of nights at the yacht club there and yet another rental car, as this will be our last stop within reasonable driving distance of NJ.