North Palm Beach Marina. The watermaker installation done by Greg at VillageMarine went well. It took about 2 days and the water from it tastes great. We thought we would be leaving here Thursday but we had engine problems. The waterpump broke and when Dan tried to get to it, he couldn’t get it loose. In comes the mechanic. It turned into a major ordeal. It seems it had been leaking salt water in the engine for some time. This caused a lot of rust and corrosion on the engine. In addition now to getting a new waterpump we now had to replace the crankcase that cracked. Mucho grande dollars later and 20 days of marina fees, it was fixed. We put the time to good use though. We went to the Palm Beach boat show, rented movies from Blockbuster, and went swimming. Tristan put his new docking skills to work and helped out boats c
oming in. Here though the tips went from a few bucks to $5 and $10’s. Glad someone is bringing in some money!! He also impressed the captain of the 9 million dollar mega yacht Maverick, which docked behind us. Later while Dan and I were sweating in the sun waxing the boat, we looked up to see Tristan waving at us from Maverick. The captain was giving him a private tour! The kids are not having it so bad. We went to the beach a few times but there were rip current and Man O War jellyfish warnings, so the kids had to be careful when they went into the water. Tessa celebrated her 7th birthday while we were here. That was fun. Normally her birthday would consist of a lot of kids at some party place, where it was usually too loud and too much money. This time while we couldn’t give her a lot of friends, we could give her our time. So for the whole day she called the shots and we spent all of our attention on her. She loved it. Even though we are still frustrated we aren’t at the Bahamas yet, and the Bahamas have now taken on an almost mystical feel, we are beginning to enjoy where we are. We finally have almost all the stuff stored so we aren’t fighting that everyday, and now we can start to enjoy each other.
We have more boat projects. Our refrigerator has a mind of its own. About every 2 weeks it stops working. When it stops I have to move everything out of the refrigerator to our freezer. Dan shuts the refrigerator down for a few days and then it starts working again. I move everything back from the freezer to the refrigerator. This lasts about 2 weeks until the refrigerator stops again. Again we move everything to the freezer. A few days later, all is right in refrigerator world and it works again. After the last time, we bought a new compressor and of course before we could install it the refrigerator began working again. Such is life.
Left Vero Beach at 6:45 am and motored for 8 hrs and 47 minutes for a total of 62.1 miles. We are now at the docks at North Palm Beach Marina ICW 1013.8
NASA
Snapshot of the International Space Station
On March 13, 2008, the International Space Station passed across the field-of-view of Germany's remote sensing satellite, TerraSAR-X, at a distance of 195 kilometers, or 122 miles, and at a relative speed of 34,540 kilometers per hour, or more than 22,000 mph. In contrast to optical cameras, radar does not 'see' surfaces. Instead, it is much more aware of the edges and corners which bounce back the microwave signal it transmits. Smooth surfaces such as those on the station's solar generators or the radiator panels used to dissipate excess heat, unless directly facing the radar antenna, tend to deflect rather than reflect the radar beam, causing these features to appear on the radar image as dark areas. The radar image of the station therefore looks like a dense collection of bright spots from which the outlines of the space station can be clearly identified. The central element on the station, to which all the modules are docked, has a grid structure that presents a multiplicity of reflecting surfaces to the radar beam, making it readily identifiable. This image has a resolution of about one meter (about 39 inches). In other words, objects can be depicted as discrete units--that is, shown separately--provided that they are at least one meter apart. If they are closer together than that, they tend to merge into a single block on a radar image. Since this image was taken, the station has expanded and is more than 90 percent complete, including a full complement of solar arrays. Image Credit: DLR
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