We certainly didn’t have a lazy day yesterday but nor did we avoid fund and relaxing. Although it took us till 7:30 to drag ourselves out of bed we went to work. Helen cleaned the decks while I stitched the section of flapping sun cover onto the head sail. We both wished we’d started earlier because it became hot very quickly. The lack of wind here makes the days heat quite stifling.<\/p>\n

We then decided to take the hookah out to one of the nearby official dive spots called “Something Special”. After the previous dive I had organized all the gear so that just the stuff we needed was ready to put in the dinghy. This made getting there and setting up very easy.<\/p>\n

A lot of the dives here in Bonaire are similar in that you have a sandy bottom at 30ft right off the beach which then falls off on a 45 degree living reef down to about 90 feet. We decided to go down to 60 feet on the reef and swim on parallel tracks rising 10ft on each turn. The same spot of reef just a few feet higher looks totally different so although we didn’t venture far we saw a lot of variety. We later learned that this dive site is included in the REEF organisation’s “Top 10 Sites for Species Richness<\/a>” along with 7 other Bonaire dive sites.<\/p>\n

Then came the middle of the day where the will to be busy is non-existent.\u00a0 It rained a few times which helped cool things and further wash the boat.<\/p>\n

In the afternoon I decided to move the genset starter battery.\u00a0 It is positioned a long way from the generator and the voltage drop along the cables is enough to cause problems at times.\u00a0 The house bank can push enough through it but the starter battery (even the new one) struggles at times.\u00a0 A lot of 420s are having this mod done so I’m not being original in this move.<\/p>\n

First step was to remove the battery and cables running to the isolation switches.\u00a0 It looked like these cables were laid in first and all the rest laid on top.\u00a0 This involved a lot of wire tie cutting and wiggling the cables through awkward gaps.<\/p>\n

Next I rewired the remaining cables so that the long cables already in place from the switches to the genset could still be used to power the genset from the house bank if required.<\/p>\n

Finally, I installed the battery case, straps, battery and cables into a nicely available space on the far side of the genset.\u00a0 This involved squeezing myself through a gap slightly too small over the top of the generator and working for some time using my back muscles to support my top half.\u00a0 I emerged from this task dripping with sweat, aching and with a few scratches.<\/p>\n

Everything worked perfectly which was pleasing.\u00a0 The job is not complete as I really need to out isolation switches between the battery and the generator.\u00a0 For that I need to cut the cables and put new ends on.\u00a0 I won’t be able to do that here.\u00a0 Perhaps in Cartegena.<\/p>\n

A beer was in order to cool down and soon I was back in the water washing off all the sweat.\u00a0 The aforementioned reef is continuous around the island so I was cooling down looking down on one of the most spectacular reefs in the world.\u00a0 Nice way to refresh.<\/p>\n

It’s possible today that our tanks will be returned from their inspection.\u00a0 It would be nice to dive with them instead of the hookah.\u00a0 Both have their plusses but the tanks give more freedom.\u00a0 We have a refill card giving 21 fills.\u00a0 We’ll use the last four to depart with full tanks.\u00a0 The rest we plan to use here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We certainly didn’t have a lazy day yesterday but nor did we avoid fund and relaxing. Although it took us till 7:30 to drag ourselves out of bed we went to work. Helen cleaned the decks while I stitched the section of flapping sun cover onto the head sail. We both wished we’d started earlier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bonaire","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2024"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2026,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024\/revisions\/2026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}