Originally Posted by Miz Trom
Hi Carl:
How are things with you? Do you still have the Scout?
We love the boat, especially after all of our upgrades. We had two great cruises in 2019.
We trailered the boat up to Lake Hartwell (GA) in May of 2019, and spent a month on the lake, visiting with family and cruising the sights.
Then we trailered the boat from there up to Knoxville. Lived aboard with our two 50-lb dogs very comfortably at a marina from June to late September, and then cruised down the Tennessee River and Tenn-Tom to Pensacola.
Before we threw off the lines in Knoxville, I flew home to St. Petersburg to consult with Mastry Marine regarding our props. Mastry had already done a water test on another TT35 to figure out the correct props for the boat with the Suzuki's. It turned out we had been over-propped all along, and Mastry sold us two new props, which Hubby Dan installed.
The difference in the outboards' performance was brilliant, as this completely solved our can't-get-up-on-plane problem. Increased our gas mileage, too.
We had a great cruise down the rivers! We spent most of our cruising time on the flybridge, and she handled beautifully. On one occasion in Pensacola Bay, we had rather large following seas coming in from the inlet for about an hour, and we were both quite pleased with her handling. She handled snotty seas on Mobile Bay with aplomb, too.
We buddy-boated with another boat coming down the Tenn-Tom to Pensacola. Zigged and zagged around large barges every day, and were very grateful to have AIS. Learned what "on the one" and "on the two" means.
In the evenings at the fuel docks, our buddies were very jealous of our fuel bill compared to their much higher bills. Their boat, a two-engine inboard Marinette gas cruiser, ate more than double the gas over the same distance at the same speed. We averaged 12 mph each day. Outboards win!
We landed in Pensacola in early November, and the temperatures plunged down to 29 degrees Fahrenheit. The little electric heater I had bought saved the day (and night!). But one of our dogs had developed a chronic ear infection, so we decided to trailer the boat home from Pensacola to St. Petersburg to get that handled at the dirt home.
Once at our dock behind our house there, we took friends out a couple of times and then joined in the neighborhood Christmas boat parade. During the boat parade, some fellow on the shore called out, "How does she handle?" I promptly executed a 360 degree spin-in-place utilizing the bow thruster and outboards, at pretty high speed. The folks lining the banks went nuts, hooting and hollering. That was fun! I FREAKIN' LOVE THE BOW THRUSTER!
And it's a retractable bow thruster, so it doesn't gather barnacles.
In March 2020, as we were prepping for the Loop, the pandemic hit.
We trailered her up to an RV & Boat storage facility in the middle of the state with sturdy steel roofs over their land slips and shorepower outlets. Mariso made friends with the Class A land yacht next to her.
She's been there ever since. Hubby Dan set up a monitoring system for the Victron controller so that he could keep an eye on everything from the dirt home. Every month, we have run up there to power up and run the outboards, and this past November Dan added a bilge heater. Our humongous Danby dehumidifier has been humming along now for a year inside the boat.
But now our two old dogs have aged out of boating. For the past three months, Hubby Dan has been seriously trying to talk me into selling the boat and getting a land yacht. I am so conflicted, because we are in the process of building a new house right now, and I don't see how we would find the time to use a land yacht.
Then last night, Hubby Dan said he thinks he has now aged out of liveaboard boating. He turns 70 in two months. I am a bit younger, at 64, but I can see his point. It has always been a lot of work to maintain our dirt home, our rental house, and the big boat. As much as we love her, it might be time to let her go.
Here's a few photos of the places we've been. The first photo is of Mariso in her land-locked storage bay.
Cheers,
Mrs. Trombley
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