3 Aug 21

We crawled out of bed about 07:30. I headed up to Ace Hardware to re-fill propane tank #3 and buy a right angle drive for my drill (another tool Woody had that I did not know I could not live without). Back at the boat, I had breakfast, then took some surplus dock lines to the U-haul storage; I also put about 15 old dock-lines (that were buried down in the port-side lazarette) up on the “free to a good home table”, at the top of the dock. They were all gone within 15 minutes. I met Woody at West Marine; I was picking up various consumables for the boat and Woody was picking up the final hardware for the solar panel. He bought all my stuff (I will reimburse him) using his professional discount, and what a discount it is. Then, we came back to the boat and got right to work on the solar panel installation. We did a trial fit up on the supports, then cut the transition braces (2” x 2” x 1/8” aluminum) that span between the davit support brackets and the panel frame, located the holes, drilled them all, fit up the panel and tightened all the bolts. Then, Woody completed the electrical connections, tidied everything up and closed the breaker. It works great, although the batteries were already charged. I loaded up the VictronConnect app on my phone so I can control the MPPT controller and see what is going on. We should not have to run the generator to charge up the batteries again - WooHoo!  Then, during Captain’s Hour a little thunderstorm threatened from the SW, so the Admiral whipped up some excellent chicken and vegetable soup and we had dinner aboard. We are on the countdown for getting into Canada now.