Island Time

Posted on December 20, 2008 by KC2RIY

I had high hopes for today. I had hoped to put most of the major items behind us. The big one being the radar install. Our earlier saviour, Eddie, was supposed to come round today to help plan parts shopping and assist in the install of the radar. I’m sure he had good reason but he didn’t show.

I haven’t quite got in the groove yet so this resulted in my frustration rather than my relaxing. On the upside Helen and I working together managed to fish all the runs necessary for the radar install and the power lines for the SSB and leave bits of string permanently in place to pull wires through when we have them.

Internet has been up and down all day. Mostly down. We wanted to get our Xmas email out today but this has been nixed by the outage. As a result I’m sending this by shortwave (still running off spare battery). At least I can do that.

Replacement parts from Lagoon are making their way here via most continents. I have UPS tracking references so every now and then, when I can get on, I can see where they’ve ended up next. Not yet in St Martin.

Weather forecasts show increasing winds into next week. We’re going to shift the boat into the lagoon tomorrow morning and settle down for the week. Hopes for resolving our o/s issues during Xmas week are getting low. Not that I mind hanging around but I had hoped to do better for when the family were here. That being said, weather down here around Xmas is predicted to be aweful so perhaps the best place is to be stuck somewhere well resourced and close to friends.

I’ll go back to drinking my rum punch. Dignity back to one-four. Roger, Roger.

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Blogging via SSB

Posted on December 19, 2008 by KC2RIY

It’s been a long time since I’ve tested this. I tried earlier and it failed. Took me a while to figure out what was wrong. Hopefully this blog will get out there. It means we can continue to share what we’re doing when we’re unable to access the internet. Fingers crossed.

The SSB setup has had a bit of a makeover. Jim kindly gave me some spare copper strip he had which I’ve used to create, hopefully, a better ground plane. I am still using the water cylinder but it’s now hooked up to the tuner via the copper ribbon rather than a wire. This is supposed to be better. We’ll soon see. Installing the copper ribbon was like working with razor wire. My hands are covered in little slices. I’m going to avoid after shave for a few days.

Today was very calm so it was shopping day. We first went to Island Water World who had agreed to raise the handle on our dinghy where the seat is supposed to sit. This will stop it falling out. While this was done we did some major provisioning of the liquid kind. This involved two treks to the cash and carry. Hopefully the boys won’t go dry at Xmas. We also bought a barbecue cover which Helen has adapted to fit over the grill my parents bought us. That’ll keep the elements off it.

It was overcast for much of today so the battle with the batteries didn’t last too long and a truce was declared.

Tomorrow Eddie should be here to install the radar. We bought the mount today. I need to measure it against the Garmin template. It’ll probably need some form of adapting plate made. At the same time we can run cables through to power the SSB off of the main batteries. That’ll reduce the wires that dangle around and annoy Helen.

The new parts from Lagoon, we now know, are on their way. The complication will be timing the install. The weather for next week forecasts strong winds – worse than we experienced when my parents were with us. This may make delivery more complicated as we want to duck into the Lagoon and get nearer the airport for when the kids arrive. We have a spot planned. This may also mean wet bums for the kids when we finally get them aboard the boat. All part of the fun.

Soon the chores will be done. The light at the end of the tunnel grows closer and larger. Then we’ll be off and hopefully getting some island time in.

FOOTNOTE: SSB sending still has an issue. All blog messages arrive pending when sent via SSB. Figured out how to solve it for other emails but not this one yet.
FOOTNOTE2: Now sorted.

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Dominoes

Posted on December 19, 2008 by steve

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.

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Feelin’ good

Posted on December 18, 2008 by steve

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.

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Charging Batteries in Paradise

Posted on December 16, 2008 by steve

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 :
1) Wake up and turn on 72V/12V cross charger with a view to have batteries mostly charged by 9:30
2) When skies permit, turn off 72V/12V charger and use solar. Tell MPPT to equalize which will attempt to bring voltage to 16.3V
3) When we’re finished with what we’re doing, turn off house circuit (including fridges) to allow voltage to maximize. (All through this time watch the batteries to make sure fizzing/electrolysis doesn’t spill over
4) Around 3pm turn on genset and continue equalizing house and charge drive bank (ready for morning cross charging)
5) Around 5pm revert to normal.

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.

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