Preparing for a Winter Trip on Belle

This is a frame for my video Sailing to the Tortugas. I placed it here as a reminder of better times on Belle.  We'll not go into what happened later the night of this video.  Sufficed to say, I was having good times aboard Belle that day.  Now I look forward to even better times.









Right now, Belle is on her trailer at New Horizons as I mention earlier.  I only hope they will "get a move on" and get the boat back to me so I can proceed with preparations for this trip.
Tentatively, my trip will be down the Gulf coast of Florida starting either at Cedar Key or perhaps at the town of Suwanee, at Millers Marina where I can have an even better place to wait out bad weather.  The date for my trip is sometime in mid to late February after income taxes are resolved.
Here are some detailed projects that I am working on.  They all seem trivial at the time. But each one has long a long-lasting impact on the success and comfort of my three month trip.
A simple thing like how much current an anchor light consumes can really make a difference in the daily budget for battery storage and replacement of electricity.  So I just spent $50 at West Marine for 31 mm festoon LED lamps for my Perko fixed mount combination all-around light.  The difference is in current use is sizable.  The two LED's draw 200 ma, while the conventional bulbs draw 1.6 amps.  With 11 hours of draw, conventional lamps would drop my battery banks by an astonishing 18 amp hours.  The LED lights on the other hand, would set me back less than 3 amp hours.
I am replacing Belle's sound system with a modern all mode player which includes Bluetooth and USB access and control.  This 200 watt unit is surprisingly inexpensive at $139.  Juxtapose that with $50 for two little LED lights. I plan on having most of the 64 gigabyte I phone 5 full of music to stream by Bluetooth.
For USB distribution, I have a 12 volt powered 7 outlet USB I/O adapter.   Next trip I hope to have a house computer system with LTE to WiFi continuous distribution. Now I will settle for a laptop and a netbook for my computing needs.  There is an LTE antenna on the mast top which should provide good coverage for my Verizon MyFi hotspot. We will depend mostly on the Garmin redundant units for navigation doing separate trip planing on laptop and uploading way-points to the mapping units.  Our software is SeaClear II which is free on the web.

Well that's enough for now.  I will provide the provisions list when as we go.  The goal is to be self sufficient in water and food for a month at a time.