Friends helping friends
11 February 2013 | Esnasdup, San Blas, Panama
Liz
We have finally made it out to the San Blas Islands on the Caribbean coast of Panama this year after a few weeks to prep the boat, install new equipment, have a haul out for an insurance survey and paint the bottom. All together, it took 3 weeks to get everything done and get out here to our cruising grounds...seemed like forever. Now the typical days are miscellaneous boat projects in the mornings followed by an afternoon of snorkeling one of the reefs. If you run out of things to fix on your own boat or maintenance tasks like polishing the stainless, there are always other folks' boats to work on! Our friends here in the anchorage were having various issues that had stumped them. So, one morning, we did a brief project on our own boat (top off the water in the batteries) before setting out to the first boat--where we isolated a problem with one solar panel and found a broken wire and now that solar array is pumping amps into the batteries--one more happy boat in the anchorage. From there, we headed over to another boat who's water maker was misbehaving. As you can imagine, fresh water is a precious necessity out here and if the water maker is not working, things start to go downhill. So, after several hours of tracing things down and confirming each component in the system, we finally decided that both the low pressure gauge and low pressure cut off switch had died. We bypassed the low pressure cut off switch (since we confirmed that the pump and pressure were good) and the system was back in business! The crew broke out the champagne to toast the success. That evening, we shared a meal of fresh red snapper and lobster--happy boats all around.