Houseship #11

The morning of our docking dawned bright cool and calm. We got up, ate breakfast leftovers and whatever. We did some research, and found that Wal-Mart, would take back all the food, liquor, and mixers we hadn't used. (good old Wally Mart). We came up with a plan for some of us to take the return stuff back and the others to stay and return The Ship. I was required as the small boat captain, so I went with the return crew. Prior to leaving The Ship, we packed everything up, and reordered her in preparation for docking. After de-anchoring, and stowing the anchors and lines, we headed in. We arrived early in the small boat, unloaded it, gassed it up and turned it in. While we were off at the Wally Mart returning the stuff, Capt. Jimmie arrived at the dock, and astutely had the young fellows at the dock land The Ship at the gas dock and then unloading dock. We ended up putting about $500 of fuel @$3.95/ gal. in The Houseship. We were way under what the literature predicted we would use. We did all the riding we desired, and ran the generator as much as we needed, so we were pleasantly surprised. We attributed it to Captain Jimmie and I having small boat experience, and knowing that medium speed on outboards is much more efficient than wide open or near wide open. The Houseship was equipped with twin 115 hp Mercury 4 stroke outboards. Normally while cruising, we ran them about 3200-3400 rpm for 7.5 mph forward progress. Max speed was about 5200 rpm, but we didn't use that. We found that as expected, the speed increase of the boat vs. the speed increase of the engines was definitely much smaller as you got over cruising speed. I.E. the boating law of diminishing returns. Also, I had brought along a refrigerator thermometer, and I could monitor the temp of our stored food. I only ran the generator as much as necessary to keep the food safely stored. We kept all our ready access drinks in a cooler, and avoided opening the refrigerator constantly. (this was suggested in the boat literature) The return crew got back from the Wally Mart, and we proceeded to haul all our stuff up the hill back to the old Previa Van. After a somewhat sad parting with good old S76, we headed off to Zion National Park. Zion was about 2.5 hrs away across a great 2-lane road through the desert. We arrived at Zion about 5 p.m. and checked into the Zion Park Lodge. The Zion Park Lodge was very nice, and we secured dinner reservations for 8 p.m. at the restaurant. We watched the deer gather on the front lawn of The Lodge to graze, and then had a festive evening celebrating Jerry and Brenda's anniversary. We ended the evening in the rocking chairs in front of the huge fireplace in our lodge foyer, planning our seeing of Zion tomorrow.

More Later,

Wes