Maintenance, Maintenance, Maintenance

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.