During our spring cruising south through Maine we got some very brief previews of how good Blue Moon‘s Espar diesel heater was, but they quite brief and fleeting.

Now it’s the day after boat show in Annapolis, and we are in a cold spell. As I have done frequently during the 2023 fall season, today my daily routine was to work from the home office in our house, then Torqueedo out to Blue Moon on our Lake Ogelton mooring to work from the boat (“WFB”?) for the afternoon. Only tonight it was chilly and Lisa was out, so I stayed for dinner aboard.

Wow.

It was windy and cold on deck, but down below I enjoyed the warmest, coziest, driest heat imaginable while the wind whistled overhead and Blue Moon swayed gently to-and-fro at her mooring.

On cold nights in Fort Lauderdale we ran the reverse-cycle AC / heat on shore power aboard our Sabre 42. Yes, it is effective, but heat pumps create damp, noisy and somehow COLD “heat.” Just think about heat pumps in a house – how does “heat” manage to feel so drafty and cold?!?! Aboard our Sabre 42, when we ran the reverse cycle heat in Fort Lauderdale we had crazy amounts of condensation forming all throughout the boat – literally dripping from the metal frames of our deck hatches while the compressor and raw water pump noisily came on and offline. Not so the diesel heat on Blue Moon. It is bone dry and cozy, producing only a distant and mild whooshing noise. I am looking forward to a long, cold Annapolis fall before I haul out – cruising locally or just enjoying the boat in town, venturing on deck for a wee dram of scotch in cold fall breezes before retiring down below to warm up in our toasty down-east teak cabin while taking in my favorite 80s television on Amazon Prime like I did tonight.

Life is good!

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