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Mexican train wreck dominoes takes a long time to play. This is why it is popular with cruisers who have a lot of time on their hands (after the boat work is finished). We had a great game last night. One couple didn’t show but there were five of us and that was enough to have a good game. All brought nibbles and lubrication. Dominoes was called off on Tuesday due to choppy conditions. Always another day and that day is today. That meant Helen and I had a quiet evening on Tuesday. Yesterday was a shopping day. It was a bit cloudy so progress on the battery front was small but there none-the-less. Yesterday evening we headed off to the Turtle Beach bar for the weekly cruisers get together at happy hour. We stayed quite a while with nibbles and extra drinks laid on by the house. More people turned up this week and some brought food too. As we’re around next week we must do this too. Latter half of evening was all karaoke. Very enjoyable. Early on Jim from Bees Knees gave me some spare copper foil to help improve my SSB setup. That put me on the path for what was accomplished today. Today we scored some results. I went back to troubleshooting the interference from the SSB. I had been told that a good (but non-durable) ground plane could be made by using tin foil and tossing it overboard into the sea. To test the hypothesis the interference was caused by a lousy ground I made a tin foil ground plane. It made no difference. That left me with only one other suggestion to follow up on. That was that somewhere on the boat there was a bad negative connection. That is a daunting task to track down. Nevertheless I thought I’d double check connections on the transceiver – the box that does all the radio work. It all looked ok but a subsequent test showed the interference to have gone. Really gone. I was suddenly sending and receiving emails at high speed on bands previously causing all sorts of flashing lights (a little exaggeration). Not a blip wrong. So what had changed? Only that the transeiver had been in contact with the metal foil covering the A/C duct. This may just fit the ‘bad negative’ connection described as being probable cause. Now with everything put back where it was except for the transceiver all is good. Also – today was a blue sky day. That meant good progress on raising acidity of house bank. Tonight it’s dominoes which also means snacks and beer. Life is good. It’s mostly work and little fun here in paradise. The day my parents left I performed what I thought was a regular maintenance task. I checked the fluid levels in the house batteries and found them short of where I have been told the levels should be. So I diligently filled them with distilled water thinking a job well done. The following day I noticed the overall capacity of the batteries had plunged. Voltage in the mornings was very low compared to the Amp Hours used over night. I took a lot of advice from folks around here and on the internet. The two conclusions I was offered were either a) my batteries were hosed or b) they must have been heavily sulphated and the electrolyte quite weak before I filled them. (Lesson learned: take hydrometer readings before filling) so before shelling out another boat buck on batteries I decided to try and fix possible cause b). It took me a couple of days to properly learned how to exploit the resources I have at hand to address the problem. My daily cycle is now : Through all this I take regular hydrometer readings of a specific reference cell to see if we have continuing performance. So far the hydrometer reads have gone from f**k*d to just about ok and they keep on getting better. looks like I may have a few more days of this. Yesterday we bought the plane tickets for the kids to get from Antigua to St Martin. We sent a long communication to them to lay out all the detail including contingency communications. Because this is a separate ticket, delays to their first flights could mean they miss the final one. We can change the flight up to an hour before it’s due to take off. We will need to keep close tabs on their progress to know whether or not we’ll need to do this. Dec 24 will be fun. Tonight we’re going to be taught Mexican Train Dominoes or something like that. We’re having crew and friend of Bees Knees over as well as the crew and daughter of Godiva. We met Mike and his wife (I think) briefly last Wednesday at the cruisers get together. All for now. It seems to be never ending. A quick account of the last few days. Friday was all batteries. After topping up my house batteries on Wednesday I they were now appearing to discharge from being fully discharged far too quickly. I’ve been concentrating so far on the possibility that adding water caused the problem. Hours blown on that and still not solved. Got to generate some new hypotheses for possible cause. I’m the first one to advise others not to get tunnel vision when advising others. There’s a possibility I’ve succumb to it myself. Don’t know. We also noticed some reduced performance on the charging of the drive banks. Looks like there’s a common issue out there and there’s a while batch of new battery chargers on their way to the Caribbean for the L420s with this issue. This will be good and bad. Always good to get equipment refreshed. Bad in that this may tie us to St Martin too close to Xmas. This will require us to fly the kids here rather than meet them there. Will know more tomorrow. Friday evening we took a break by visiting Ann and Jim in Bees Knees for some excellent hospitality and to meet their friend Bonnie with whom Jim is currently writing a book. In cruisers fashion we all brought part of the dinner. The theme was our usual for Fridays. Curry. Delicious. Yesterday was more battery activity with further support from CatCo (big thanks guys). With relief I learned any replacements are still warrantied. Further house battery investigations and activities included swishing the water around inside using my hydrometer in case there was a poor mix. Rather more successfully I installed fins on our outboard. These help keep the bow down and improve the dinghies ability to plane with higher loads. It involved drilling through the metal which always ends up with the odd shard making it’s way into flesh. Nevertheless the results were great. Helen and I went to the supermarket yesterday and loaded up (including lots of beer for the boys) and the dinghy got out of the water fairly easily which we know it couldn’t do before. It needs some fine tuning as the dinghy now pulls to the left. Out of the water it’s obvious one of the fins have slipped. Just need to get it adjusted. Helen has been equally busy preparing the boat. She’s made some curtains for the salon area which we hung yesterday. This deals with the low sun in the late afternoon quite effectively. I’ve also been taking advice on the interference issues coming from my SSB. Consensus right now that my grounding is lousy. We’ve got a radio head (meant nicely) visiting this afternoon to take a look at the setup and advise. That will direct some of my activity next week. This afternoon we’re going to have Des and Sue (from Desue) come aboard. They’ve finally come out of the marina after their genset repairs. This means they are back to being mobile as they could not lower their dinghy while in the marina. I’ll use the opportunity to discuss batteries, etc with Des who, like many round here, is an engineer. Eddie swung by just now. He’s going to pop round tomorrow morning to discuss radar installation. This we need his help for even if I end up running lots of the wires before he does the difficult stuff. I’ll also talk to him (and probably all the others) about yet another issue I have. My VHF radio keeps dropping into low power complaining the voltage is too low. I have metered it’s power supply and it does drop through the floor when transmitting on high power. Could be I have poor cabling. The wires are quite thin but advice would be welcome before I start running thicker wires to the console area. In between all this we get time to relax and read. Just not much yet. Tomorrow we hope to make the decision about Xmas. Chances are we will be flying the kids here. I think, from their perspective, this will improve the vacation. St Martin will add a variety and provide them access to cheap local beer on land which they won’t get in Antigua. (They’ll get beer but I understand it’s not cheap) That’s all for now. I have an idea about my batteries so I’m off to fiddle. So back on the boat we were presented with the dilemma of replacing our fuel tank. Fortunately Jim from Bees Knees was available to lend a hand. He dinghied over to us, took me to collect the parents and then we went to the nearby Budget Marine to collect a tank. The new tank is a bit smaller than my last and cheaper looking. Oh well. Fortunately, it didn’t cost as much as I feared. Yesterday we moved the boat back into the Lagoon through the 8:15 bridge opening. Helen and I then raced off to the Budget Marine in the south of the lagoon where we had to drop of our propane tank for the 9am refill deadline. We then went off to a few local stores to get stuff we needed. We took a lot longer than expected so understandable the parents were a little worried when we returned. We noticed that Dignity had slipped on her anchor somewhat while we were away. Thankfully not too far as my parents had no idea how to deal with a runaway boat. We decided to reset the anchor. In doing so we discovered what had stopped the slippage. We had become fouled in a thick chain serving some unknown purpose on the floor of the lagoon. I got the job of diving down and attaching a line to the anchor so we could pull it up backwards. This worked perfectly. Reseting the anchor didn’t the first time as it would not hold. On the next attempt we found a nice patch of sand into which the anchor stuck fast. We marked this area with a waypoint so we could find it again. Yesterday evening we moved the boat west so we could be near to the restaurant Turtle Bar where a cruiser get together was planned. We arrived in time for Happy Hour and met some old and new friends. It was nice to meet Mike the morning net controller who keeps us entertained. At the same bar we ate our final meal together which went down very well. The place we had moved the boat to was also close to the airport. At 3pm today I took my parents to the airport and we said our goodbyes. It’s been great having them with us for 3 weeks and to share a little of our new life with them. Getting back to the boat we shifted it back to our marked sandy patch so we could get connected again. We have paid for a service which only works around Marigot so we need to be up that end. So it’s back to Helen and I being alone on the boat. We have two weeks to get ready for the boys. We still need to install the radar. I need to sort out some on board interference from the SSB. We also need to bulk buy everything we can reasonably get on St Martin as many things are cheaper here than down islands. Mostly this means beer and wine. In about a week we’ll head off to Antigua. This will be an overnight sail. If we can leave earlier we will and perhaps squeeze in Statia. |
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