Progress continues regarding the various boat projects and mothballing efforts. In fact, Mary Margaret, with the help from Jenny of S/V Mystic, finished her major work today. The interior of Leu Cat is clean and shiny. The woodwork is glowing to a highly polished beauty, the floors have been scrubbed, the rugs washed, the heads are gleaming. In short, the interior looks like a new boat!

I am also making progress and I can now start to see the end of the list of projects that I wanted to complete before we leave for the States. Today we took Leu Cat over to the fuel dock and topped off her diesel tanks. This is important as it helps prevent water condensation forming on the inside walls of the fuel tanks during cold snaps. I also isolated one of our gel batteries in our house bank. After 7 hard years of use, it finally failed when we applied shore power to it upon arrival here. I had suspected its failure when the other day I started smelling a foul order coming from under our guest suite bed. I could not get to it readily then because the bed was full of stuff that I had piled there while that side was being cleaned. Thus, I had taken us off shore power to see if the odor would dissipate. It did, strengthening my suspicion of a failed battery.

When I turned us back onto shore power the odor did return. Thus, I finally moved all of the stuff that was on the bed and opened up the area where the house batteries are stored. The third battery was very warm to the touch and since we were using 13 amps of power when we should have been on float and using only 0 to 2 amps, I knew I had located the culprit.

While I have removed its cables connecting it to the other batteries, it will not be until tomorrow before I remove it from the boat. I wish it to fully cool off before I start to mess with it. I am thinking that we will cross the Atlantic next year with just 800 ah (amp hours) of storage capacity in our house batteries and wait until we get to the Caribbean before I replace all of the batteries. Up until now, we have had about 1000 ah of power capacity. Gel batteries are much cheaper in the Caribbean than here and we should still have a few years’ worth of service from the remaining batteries. I believe this one failed due to all of the pounding we took this year crossing the Indian Ocean. We have been watching this battery for the last three years. When we were in New Zealand back in 2011, I had all of the batteries checked out and the technician told us to watch this one carefully as it was under performing a bit. Time and pounding has caught up to it and did it in.

Mary Margaret also hauled me up the mast this afternoon. The winds are supposed to return tomorrow and they will be blowing for a number of days. Thus, it was now or never to go up the mast for a detailed inspection of the mast and its standing rigging. Everything looked fine with no cracks anywhere and I did not see any broken or cracked strands in the rigging. While 70 feet above the water, I took a few photos which I will post to and above this blog so you can see the views that I had. For references, the medium sized hatches that you see on the deck below me are 21 by 15 inches.