We are cruising in a beautiful paradise where every day it’s sunny and 78 degrees and the water is an almost unnatural turquoise color, so I may have a hard time garnering sympathy, but we did have a hard week!
Our biggest problem this week was the batteries. We have a 340W solar panel to charge the batteries, but really also need an hour or so each day of charging from the engine to keep them fully charged. We recently discovered that the engine has not been charging the batteries since we left New Bern. We did some trouble-shooting while moored off Treasure Cay Marina in a very protected anchorage and found a blown fuse on the battery regulator and then an almost cut wire which probably caused the fuse to blow. We also found a plug to the alternator with a pin bent over. With all of these issues corrected, we felt sure we had found our smoking gun and that we had fixed the engine battery charging problem. Nope! Still not charging.
The state of the batteries has gotten worse over the last couple weeks and we were running the risk of damaging them. We are also able to charge the batteries using shore power-you plug a big cord into a receptacle on a pier and using an AC powered charger can charge the 12 volt DC batteries. The only problem is we had ripped out our old charger because we had bought a new charger/inverter to install. However, we could not get it done before we left New Bern, so we planned to do it when we got to the Bahamas. We spent a few long days installing the new equipment. It took WAY more time than we expected. We were stuffed into awkward positions in the storage area under the cockpit, hanging upside down over the engine all while sweating profusely and trying to force heavy cables into cable runs and twists and turns where they really weren’t inclined to go. I never knew there could be so much discussion and angst over “electrical grounds”-DC ground, AC ground, AC neutral, inverted neutral, ship’s ground. And if you get any of these mixed up in your wiring, you can destroy a $2500 piece of equipment! Finally, it was all installed; now we just had to get to a slip (dock) in a marina where we could “plug in” and charge the batteries.
Living on a boat is a bit like camping or roughing it, but with greatly reduced battery power, it was a bit rougher than we liked! We have a reverse osmosis watermaker that needs to be run every couple days to make fresh water. If you go more than 5 days between running it you risk damaging the very expensive membrane, but with the batteries as low as they were we couldn’t run it. We also turned the refrigerator off at night and used our little Luci solar powered inflatable lights for lighting at night to try to preserve the batteries. We couldn’t charge our phones. Our laptops were dead and we had no way of charging them.
We decided to make a short sail (15 miles) from Treasure Cay to Marsh Harbour where we would have access to more services and stores for parts if needed. Marsh Harbour is Bahama’s 3rd biggest city (population 6000 to give you some perspective). As we were motoring through a very narrow, twisty channel to get out of our anchorage, we couldn’t get our chartplotter (navigational equipment) to turn on. We have paper charts (maps), but the Sea of Abaco is filled with all sorts of shoals so it is important to know your exact location with respect to the shallow areas so you don’t run aground. We then grabbed the iPAD which also has charts on it, but it wanted to verify the password and given there was no internet available, that wasn’t happening. A message popped up literally every 10 sec. asking for password verification and freezing the screen. Frustrating!
Ah, but it gets worse…the wind died which then meant we had to motor and we were not feeling confident in our engine. We barely had enough time to get to our destination before it got dark. It’s tough enough to navigate with just an iPad that freezes constantly in the daylight-no way we were risking going in in the dark.
As we got close to our destination, we began calling marinas on the VHF radio to reserve a slip. No marina responded after repeated calls…is our radio dead too we wondered. We later learned that everyone goes home by 4 around here and it was about 4:15. Finally another boat owner staying in one of the marinas answered us and offered to call the marina management and arrange for us to come in. As we were slowly motoring in trying to find the right dock, the depth alarm was constantly going off. We draw 5 feet and that’s what the depth was showing so we could go aground at any moment and it would be dark shortly! Luckily it all worked out and we got in and tied up just as dusk approached. What a relief!
The first thing we wanted to do was to hook up our shore power to our newly installed charger and get the batteries charged up. Got everything hooked up, flipped the switch and…got the equivalent of the blue screen of death on the computer-the reverse polarity light. We quickly shut everything down and prayed we hadn’t damaged anything. We were very grumpy and discouraged when we went to bed that night. David said he was going to check flights home. This is not what we imagined life like as cruisers!
To bring this long sad story to a close, I’ll jump to the end. We have now fixed the chartplotter, the new battery charger is working and batteries are fully charged, the new inverter is working so we can charge our laptops (well not David’s – it’s decided it doesn’t recognize the charger anymore) and use AC powered equipment, the leaky head (toilet) has been fixed, the leaky watermaker has been fixed, the stainless has all been cleaned and waxed (it was beginning to rust after just 2 weeks in this high salt environment), the water tanks are full, the laundry is clean, the refrigerator and best of all - snack cabinet - have been re-stocked and we can turn lights on again! We felt “Life is good” again as we sat on the deck sipping drinks and watching the colorful sunset over the water, listening to someone blow a conch shell to bade the sun goodnight.
Tomorrow, we start working on solving the engine battery charging problem and then we will be cruising again!