February 1st, 2009 Thompson's Bay, Long Island

Yesterday when we hoisted the Windbugger into the rigging and plugged it in.it didn't do anything. There was enough wind, and it should have been running at about 5 to 10 amps, but there was nothing. It was too windy to do much testing, so we tied the prop down with a bungee and waited for the wind to subside.

After Cruiseheimer's ( which is an SSB Net that we listen to most mornings) on Sundays and Wednesdays there is something call "Tech Net" where boaters call in with all kinds of problems and solutions. I thought that the problem with the Windbugger was a bad diode and called in to ask if I could just hotwire the system directly into my battery bank. I didn't think it could hurt anything if I disconnected things when the wind went down. The consensus on the net was that I was correct.so I had a plan.

This morning the wind was down enough to do some testing without putting my life on the line so I started checking everything out. After about two hours of tracing continuity, I found a worn spot in a wire at the base of the mast where it goes through the deck. There was no way that I could remove the bad wire without creating a leak in our mast to deck seal so I had to run completely new wire. By noon I had a temporary fix in place.

We listened to the Spartans lose their second home game in a row. which has to be some kind of Breslin record. It sounded like Penn. State shot the lights out and we spent much of game missing everything.

Our plans were to go ashore to and walk to a Super bowl party but when it was time to go we were comfortably reading books in the cockpit and decided to just stay on the boat.

We baked some pork chops for dinner and watched an episode of CSI before going to bed.