Sunday, June 29 — View of the channel from the bridge taken during a morning walk. Kosmos is in the marina to the right, in the first row long the channel.
Statue near the bridge
This morning, Eric was feeling motivated to tackle some boat projects. But first, he transferred fuel into the day tank. Eric normally kept the day tank full. But because the fuel transfer pump wasn’t working, he’d let the day tank get low. The reason was that he normally used the transfer pump to balance boat. This means that if one fuel tank had more fuel than the other, the boat would tip sideways, so he used the transfer pump to move the fuel between the tanks to ensure the boat was level. Since the transfer pump wasn’t working, he was using the day tank to help with balancing. He’d let the day tank empty out, then he’d move appropriate amounts of fuel from each of the tanks into the day tank as needed for proper balancing.
His first project was the generator. First, he had to move a bunch of stuff out of the way to get to the impeller. Then he flushed seacock with pressurized fresh water (which meant he took the hose into the engine room and squirted the hose water into the hole that the generator sucks water from). As far as he could tell, there didn’t seem to be a blockage. Then he checked the impeller, which looked fine.
He started the generator up. It really struggled to start, but once it got started, it ran fine. That is when Eric had an epiphany. The day tank had never gotten so low before. The issue must be that the day tank was too low for the generator pump to pull out fuel! He checked with Lugger Bob Senter, who confirmed this was indeed the reason the generator went dead.
Eric was pretty excited to be off to such a good start. The next project was the pilot house air conditioning. We have an attachment to our sea stainers that allows us to plug in a hose to flush it with fresh water. He plugged it into the pilot house A/C, closed the through-hull, and ran the A/C unit with the fresh water for about 5-minutes. Then he opened the through-hull and all the pressure water came out, pushing some pine needles out with it. He removed the hose and put the A/C back to its normal settings. He turned the A/C on and it worked fine, so the issue seemed to be the pine needles in the system. Woo hoo! Two for two!
The next project was the transfer pump. We had a spare onboard. However, when Eric was collecting spares, he hadn’t been able to find the same model as was installed in Kosmos, so the spare was a different model. Eric started working on pulling out the old fuel transfer pump, and was sad to see the fittings we had were the wrong size for the new pump.
In the afternoon, we went to the Tidewater Comicon, which was held at the Tidewater Convention Center in Virginia Beach, which was in the Oceanfront part of town.
We’d expected traffic to be bad around the convention center, but it was light. The parking lot was free, but full. We found free parking nearby in what appeared to be an overflow lot for the convention center.
Christi has never been to a Comicon before, primarily because she knew the San Diego Comicon would be too overwhelming for her. She liked the idea of going to a smaller one to get a taste of what the bigger one would be like. Eric and Keith have been to the San Diego Comicon before. They were curious to see how this one compared.
We started with the exhibit floor. There were at least 250 vendors in small stalls selling a wide variety of products: comics, games, books, toys, original art, T-shirts, costumes, jewelry…. As big as it was, Eric and Keith estimated that this one was about 1/5 the size of San Diego’s exhibit floor.
There was an area where they periodically did raffles and an area where they offered classes such as drawing. There was a room where you could try out a variety of board games (unsurprisingly, it was sponsored by a company that sold board games). There was also a video game room, but we didn’t go into it. There was a Celebrity Zone, where you could meet the featured special guests and have them sign autographs. The only one we’d heard of was Lou Diamond Philips, who we didn’t have a burning desire to meet.
Of course, the funnest part of Comicon was to see all the people dressed up in costume. There were a lot of cool costumes, many of which were very clever and creative. The costumes made the whole experience worth the visit in and of itself.
Once we’d seen the exhibit floor, we looked at the session schedule. In San Diego, the sessions ran all day long, and there were usually several sessions to choose from during each block of time. We were disappointed to see that the sessions ended at 2:30 pm. Had we looked more carefully at the itinerary, we would have gone to the sessions first and waited to explore the exhibit floor until after all the sessions had ended.
The first session we went to was a show put on by an improv troupe called Plan B. The show was hilarious. They pulled people from the audience to participate, and one of the guys was a natural. Several people encouraged him to join the troupe.
The second section was a lecture on world building by Bryan “Kaiser” Tillman, creator of Dark Legacy and Ninja Empire. He explained what it takes to create worlds from scratch and how to make them a fully realized, living, breathing world/universe. It was a surprisingly interesting lecture.
After the talk ended, we decided to leave since we’d seen it all. Our friends from the Bahamas, Miss Roxy, lived near the convention center and had invited us over for dinner. Since Comicon had been scheduled to end at 1700, we’d planned to meet them at 1730. We contacted them and asked them if they were up for us coming over earlier, and they said yes. We had a lovely late afternoon/evening with them.
