First the Good: Finding people and asking people to sign the quilt was a lot of fun. It gave us an excuses to knock on the boats and bump into people all over the place, especially people who were from Ohio, and Midwest area of the United States and people that had C&C sailboats. Lorraine became known as the quilt lady on our trip.

The BadEndless trips to fabric stores and always trying to get the little muslin squares ironed flat with the freezer paper on. It was a constant project all the time. Sometimes we would wander all over these little towns looking for fabric stores and very seldom did they have what we wanted. Almost always, these were dead-end searches.

and The Ugly:  We had to use the iron. Yes we have an iron on our boat which we use because we are making a quilt. The iron pulls like 1500 Watts and Lorraine loves to use it when were anchored. Boys this is fun! So what we do? We turn on the engine, get the alternator cranking out everything it can so that we will not kill the batteries. Then comes the good part. We plug the iron into the inverter and turn it on. The first thing is the little LED current meter goes right to 100 Amps. That means we are pulling 100+ Amps at over 12 V DC out of the batteries. This is really the max load the inverter can ever see. The second thing is after it sits there for maybe — 30 seconds, the fan goes on and the fan never goes on otherwise. Actually, we never heard the fan before this. The LED light goes from green, to yellow, to red while the fan goes in to high-speed mode and after a few seconds of high-speed the inverter turns off, and that’s it, until next ironing session. Time to get in the dinghy and go to lunch.

Lorraine’s rebuttal: The fan did turn on, the lights did turn red, but it was not seconds before the inverter turned off it was a few minutes. AND I only used it for quilting, not for ironing clothes. Phil expects me to iron when the boat is heeled? Get real.