At 4:30am we heard an arcing sound and a click. Not a good sound, and one that definitely woke both of us out of our sleep. Got up and looked at our electric panels and discovered that the battery charger had kicked off - so we checked the readings on the batteries. Seems like they should have been about fully charged but were reading 12.39 for battery 1 and 12.53 for battery 2. We had to wait until daybreak to see anything in the battery compartment (Bill's little room on the boat) so dashed back to the warmth of the covers until morning broke. After Wayne emptied out the battery compartment of fins, life vests, and miscellaneous things like generators, we flipped the battery charger on again so he could see if anything was causing the arcing but didn't see anything. We heard the arcing sound again and a "pop" then the switch kicked off again. Sigh...Good way to start November - shivering and no battery charger! We kicked on the engine to make sure the engine would charge the batteries and it looks like it is - the batteries came up to 12.6 and 12.7 so we should be able to get to Oriental and hopefully have someone look at it/fix it there. That appears to be the next large port that we come to which is roughly 4 days travel for us from here...

Left at close to 9:30 and headed south down the ICW through Albemarle Sound (15 miles of shallow open water) until just where you tuck back into a cut. We headed for South and East Lake to anchor for the evening. It was tricky getting in, a lot of shoals, and we're anchored in 6.5 ft. Grilled pork chops, made coleslaw & biscuits and had pork & beans with it all for dinner.

There was one other boat here when we pulled in so we gave him a lot of space and went to the other side of the lake, then another boat came in while we were eating dinner and anchored next to him. I pulled out the binoculars to see who it was - it was Rafiki. We keep crossing paths with them - they were in the anchorage where we pulled up the anchor, then at Bluewater Marina. We're going to have to meet these people - we keep bumping into them.

Wayne's pretty sure it could be one of several things - the capacitor, a thermistor or varistor or diodes or it could be the charger itself. It's tucked behind the refrigeration unit so not easily accessible soooo, we'll definitely have to find somewhere to look at it.