Water, Water, Water
04 August 2011 | Bora Bora Yacht Club
Sunny with wind and rain
Yesterday was job and haul day. We started by trying to replace one of our circuit breakers on our electric panel. The switch that controls the lights in the engine room started tripping and disconnecting the circuit when it was first turned on. After a couple of flicks of the switch, it would stay on. I pulled out one of our replacement breakers(can't carry too many spare parts) and unscrewed the breaker in the panel and unscrewed the wires(of course, I had already turned off all the power to the panel). It wouldn't come out. It appears to be wedged under one of the connector strips. Getting frustrated easily, I reconnected the wires and screwed it back into the panel. When I turned the power back on, the switch appears to be working fine. Who knows? Loose wire maybe? At least it is working fine now and I still have a replacement in case it gets bad again.
Once that was done, we loaded our water jugs(4--2.5 gallon jugs) into the dingy and headed to the dock at the yacht club to start refilling our tanks. We have a water maker that we turn on every time we fire up our generator but it can't seem to keep up with our usage. It supposedly makes 8 gallon per hour so in an average generator run, we make about 24 gallons. With that much production(we run the generator just about every day) we should be able to keep up with usage. We're going to put the production tube in one of our jerry cans and see how much we are actually making the next time we fire her up. We took our filtration system ashore(GE charcoal filters as well as a paper filter) that we can connect to the hose from the faucet to make sure all the water we bring aboard is as clean as it can possibly be. We have friends that took on water at Anaho Bay in Nuka Hiva from a faucet ashore and it ended up fouling their tanks. They had to pump all their water out and get in a clean their tanks. We've always done it this way, especially since we left the US. It slows down the flow, but all the water you get is as good as it can be. The yacht club has their own desalination plant so I checked it with our salinity meter(for our water maker) and it came in more pure than the water we make aboard. Hauling 10 gallons each trip, I finally hauled 80 gallons back to Zephyr. Tracy stayed ashore with our filtration system. The hose from the yacht club allowed us to fill our jugs right in Puff so there was no hauling involved. We started about 1100 and finished about 1430. The club charges 500 francs($6.25) for 100 liters or about 26 gallons so it cost us 1,500 francs($18.75) for what we took aboard. We burn far more gas in the generator to make that much water. With the tanks just about full, we will have plenty for our next voyage. We hold 265 gallons so we should not run short.
A while later, we headed back ashore for showers and only had to wait for two people ahead of us before we got in. On our way back to Zephyr(about 1830) we saw a sailboat coming into the yacht club mooring field looking for a buoy to hook onto. With it being pitch black, even with flashlights, they were not having much luck. There were only a few balls left to hook on to. We dropped our shower equipment off at Zephyr, grabbed a flashlight of our own and took off to help them out as we knew where the available mooring balls were. We zipped over to them and told them to follow us in. Tracy spotted one of the buoys and we lead them right to it. We even handed them the mooring line. Their boat(Champagne) was safely hooked for the night. We headed back to Zephyr and had a nice late dinner and settled in for another movie night on the computer.