It's not fun to wake up in the middle of the night to a water drop hitting your forehead, but that happened to me. The hatch directly over the bunk seems like a cool idea...you can look out and see the stars at night and on warm days you can get fresh air in the boat. But it apparently comes with a downside.
Now you might be thinking the hatch is leaking...but it wasn't raining and hasn't for at least a day. The key is that it was cold outside. Yeah, cold. Not Colorado cold, but pretty cold by Florida standards...I think the low was somewhere in the upper 30's (Fahrenheit). It makes perfect sense now that I think about it, but at 2am who is thinking. Add in the fact that we've not spent time on boats in colder climates, and I just never thought of it as a possibility, until now.
Yes, if you put a person in a small plastic cocoon and then drop the temperature on the outside of that cocoon, the water in your breath condenses on the inner surface. Since the hatch is the thin spot in the cocoon and has nice sharp bends, the condensation forms and flows to the low point and...splat...right on the forehead.
So, for those that haven't experienced this phenomenon, this is your public service announcement. You can create rain indoors on a boat in the middle of the night.
Monday evening the temperature is supposed to drop again, this time the prediction is down to 29...that seems pretty darn cold for Florida. I guess I need to keep the heat up (above the dew point) and keep air moving so I don't have rain...or ice...coming from the hatch.
And I thought being woken up by chirping smoke detectors was bad.
ReplyDeleteWait until you are woken up by the bilge alarm going off. That ought to get the blood pumping.
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