09/28/2009, Puerto Amistad, Bahia De Caraquez, Ecuador
Now that we are back in Bahia de Caraquez, it is time to get back to real work. We leave for the US on October 4th and we both have a lot to do in preparation for the court case that I am testifying in. Thus, today was back to the salt mines.
The highlight of the day actually occurred during the evening. Buzz and Maureen of Encore invited us to join them for dinner at the local Chinese restaurant. During dinner we enjoyed listening to the adventures they had in northern Peru. They had left for Peru a couple of weeks before we went to Peru and they returned a week or so before we did. While the company was great, the food left a lot to be desired so I doubt we will return to this place again. I must admit, I miss the wonderful food that you seem to find everywhere in Peru!
MM note: About a week ago I wrote about a piece of Incan jewelry I bought. The design was beautiful. There is a picture of it with the blog. I found out what most of the design means. The four corners symbolize: water, air, sun and moon (sun is male and moon is female), the inner four corners are the four Incan original tribes. The triangle is the world - the condor is heaven, the puma is earth and the snake is hell. That is all I could find on the jewelry. I mentioned I would get back to you so... until we speak again...
Techno-Tip Of The Day: Deck and Hull Repair
Over time your hull or deck will get a number of little nicks or dings in it. These are easy to repair and should be repaired as soon as they happen. It is important to fix these immediately in order to keep moisture or water from seeping into the fiberglass base that is below the gel coat. Moisture will wick into the fiberglass and, when sealed, can cause bubbles to form in the gel coat over time.
To repair these little dings, you need to have two things: Marine Tex and a tube of gel coat. Marine Tex is a two-part compound that you mix. You absolutely need at least a small container of this material on board before you start cruising.
Before you mix up the Marine Tex, however, you first need to prepare the ding. You do this by sanding the ding to remove any rough edges around the gel coat. If the exposed fiberglass has been exposed to water, let it dry as best it can in the sunlight. However, remember that you are living on water and the natural humidity may make it impossible to completely dry out. Once it is as dry as it can be, next take a cloth saturated with acetone and clean the ding out of any dirt and dust. The acetone will also help remove any moisture from the near surface of the exposed fiberglass.
Now mix up the Marine Tex to the consistency that its instructions give you. Using a tongue depressor or a small rubber spatula, fill in the ding. If the ding is deep, you need to plan on applying two coats. The photo to this blog shows a ding I have in the deck after I have filled it with one coat. Tomorrow, I will apply a second coat and continue with instructions on how to finish it off. The photo was actually difficult to capture. The Marine Tex is just as white as the gel coat when it is fresh. Thus, I had to enlarge the photo and greatly enhance the contrast. It looks pretty ugly to me, much more than it actually is to the naked eye. The points I want to capture with the photo are: 1) the fiberglass is sealed by the Marine Tex, 2) the edges of the ding are also sealed and 3) the Marine Tex is raised above and over the edges of the ding onto the surrounding good gel coat. Once the ding is fully covered with the Marine Tex and the ding is filled, I will then sand it flat and prep it for the gel coat.
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09/27/2009, Puerto Amistad, Bahia De Caraquez, Ecuador
One of the nice things about being back on our boat is that there is a certain routine that you can depend on. Now don't get me wrong, I am not a fan of set routines and, in fact, after being in a place for more than two or three weeks, both Mary Margaret and I start getting stir crazy and feel that it is time to move on. That is the reason we love cruising so much. Even though Mary Margaret loves to "nest", she can do that with our boat and still travel. I guess you can say that we are like turtles that take their home with them on their backs!
However, when we travel inland and have to constantly stay in hotels, we do like to come back to our little home on the ocean and settle into the day-to-day functions of living on a boat. It is the same feeling we had when we lived on the land and returned to our home from a vacation. You certainly enjoyed the vacation, but there is a certain, distinct pleasure returning to your home sweet home.
With that said, there are also certain displeasures that wait for you when you return home from an extend stay away. In our case, it is getting the boat back into shape after being closed down for over two weeks.
The main focus of our efforts this time was trying to figure out which of our battery meters was correct. The meter on our battery charger was telling us the batteries were fully charged and happy. The Tri-metric battery meter was telling us the batteries were happy but were 25 percent discharged.
When we started the generator the battery charger refused to charge the batteries and we were not sure if this was because the batteries were fully charged or the charger was not working properly. Mary Margaret and I spend the better part of two hours crawling under the transom and in the stern lazerette unbolting the charger and checking it out. We came to the conclusion that the charger was still wired correctly and was working; it just was seeing the batteries as fully charged. Thus, we came to the conclusion that the Tri-metric meter was in error. This can happen over time since the formula that the Tri-metric uses to count the amps going into and out of the batteries is prone to a slight error. Over time, the errors accumulate and you really don't know the status of the batteries. This is not the fault of the Tri-metric meter; it is a well-established problem of all amp meter counters due to the complex formula they use to account for amp losses when you recharge the batteries. Since it had been last May when we were last on shore power and the batteries were last 100 percent charged, the errors in amps going into the battery had accumulated to about 200 amps over the last 5 months.
The only way we know of confirming that the batteries are really fully charged is to not use the batteries over night and then check their open circuit voltage. If it is above 12.85 volts (for gels batteries), then the batteries are fully charged. We called Buzz of Encore and asked if he would come over and discuss this situation with us. Our thinking was that three heads are better than two. When Buzz arrived we discussed our situation and the three of us pondered and discussed and pondered some more. Finally, Buzz came to the same conclusion as we had and agreed that our course of action was the correct one to follow.
When we went to bed, our voltage was at 13.0 volts since the batteries were receiving a charge all day from the solar panels and we kept all the various things that draw amps turned off. With luck, the voltage will be at least 12.85 tomorrow morning when we get up. If so, we will know that the batteries are fully charged and we can reset the Tri-metric meter to read fully charged.
Techno-Tip Of The Day: Amp Counters
As you have seen from reading the above, all amp counters are prone to errors that accumulate over time. The situation we are faced with is common when you spend most of your time at anchor instead of being docked in a marina and plugged into shore power. We have decided that in the future, when we are on the hook for extended periods of time, that once every three months we will spend the night with all of the power turned off so we can check the cold battery open circuit voltage. Up until now, we have not done this primarily because we did not want to have a night where the freezer was not working. However, if I turn the thermostat on the freezer way down for a few days, and then turn the freezer off, the food will stay frozen overnight without the freezer running. This will be our future quarterly pattern of operation.
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09/26/2009, Puerto Amistad, Bahia De Caraquez, Ecuador
We left Cusco yesterday morning and flew back to Lima, where we spent the night at the Miraflores Park Hotel. This is the same hotel that we ate the Sunday brunch at with the Kennedys almost two weeks ago. We liked the hotel so much we decided that we would stay here when we returned to Lima. We made the right choice, as our room was to die for. The bed was the best bed we have had in a very long time. We had a wonderful view of the ocean and the paragliders that drift along the bluffs above the ocean use this hotel as their marker to turn around and return to their starting point. The photo I posted with this blog shows one such paraglider.
Once we checked in we called Shane Kennedy and invited him and his girlfriend, Sonya, for dinner. We wanted to treat them as a small way to show our appreciation for all of the work they did to make our 16 days in Peru so enjoyable.
They arrived at 1800 and after a drink and a billiards game in the bar, we settled in for a delicious dinner in the hotel's restaurant. By 2100 we were in bed since we had to get up early to go to the airport and catch our plane to Guayaquil, our port of entry back into Ecuador.
The next day we grabbed a cab for the airport and soon had cleared security and were waiting for our plane. That wait also soon passed and before we knew it, we had landed and were back in Ecuador. We were curious to see how many days our new visa would be for. The government of Ecuador is closely aligned with the governments of Bolivia and Venezuela. All three highly dislike the American government, mostly due to the former policies created during the Bush presidency. One of the ways they show their displeasure is by refusing to grant new visas for the full 90 days allowed. We had been told of various stories of injustices when it came to renewing of visas. Well, we can confirm the inconsistencies between the way they treat Americans versus people from other countries. The immigration officer asked how many days we wanted on our new visa. Mary Margaret asked for 90 and he ended up giving each of us just 30 days. Fortunately, we leave for the US in just about a week, so the 30 days is more than enough for now. However, we plan on visiting the Ecuador Consulate when we are in Los Angeles and make a request for a 12X visa, which will let us stay in Ecuador until we leave for the French Polynesia in late March/early April. We have been told that you can get extended visas much easier when you are out of the country. We shall see.
From Guayaquil we took a 5-hour bus ride back to Bahia de Caraquez and good ol' Leu Cat. By 2030 we were back aboard our lovely boat/home and soon we were in bed, thankful that the trip home was so easy.
Travel Tip Of The Day: Visas
Before you set sail to a foreign country, it would be wise to research the visa restrictions of the country(s) you plan to sail to. As in our case with Ecuador, it would have been better to get an out of country visa for 180 days than to do what we did. We got a 90-day visa when we arrived with hopes of renewing it for another 90 days. We have discovered that this will be highly unlikely and now we are forced to apply for an out of country visa when we return to the US. When we are back in the US, we plan to call the New Zealand and Australian consulates to see what we need to do to get 180-day visa for those countries as well. Next year we will be in New Zealand for the hurricane season and the following year we will be in Australia. Since the hurricane season is just about 6 months, we will need the longer visas to be safe and sound in protected waters.
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No respectable tour is complete without a beautiful sunset.
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Here are the royal baths used by the Inca.
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