Onto the FKG Dock
02 June 2007 | FKG Riggers
Randy
We moved onto the FKG dock today. I have been stopping in every day to see if they're ready for us and I think it has helped. They can't start on the boat for another few days but at least we're in front of them. If we're going to sit in this water at least now we have shore power and dinghy-less shore access.
A boat called Rush showed up in the anchorage today. I really dig their paint job. They took off before we had a chance to meet them.
There is a cruisers net on the VHF in the mornings in Saint Martin. This morning several cruisers were getting info on wind generators. They decided to head over to Budget Marine to consider some options so I joined in. It turned out to be Seeyamanana and Lone Star. We had met SYM in the BVI and had heard Lone Star on the radio all the way back in the Bahamas but had never met them. No one actually bought and I think I have talked myself out of the concept. We have a great solar panel set up and the down side on the wind generator isn't overcome by the marginal extra power we would generate. At least that's my stance for the next 10 minutes.
Patrick from FKG repaired the main breaker on our Inverter Charger today. The breaker was burned and was acting like a resistor. The Charger saw a volt more than there was on the batteries (i.e 13 instead of 12) so never charged and the Inverter saw a volt less (i.e. 11 instead of 12) and thus always shut down. We had a 150 amp breaker on the circuit which we replaced with a fuse. The Inverter/Charger went from boat anchor to useful device.
Patrick also put a rush on our new shore power cables allowing us to hook up to 50 amps for the first time. We had a 30 amp service previously which prohibited running both AirCon units. This boat is a bit too big for one AirCon to cool. Two work great though. Another great improvement.
I've been working on my own list of projects as the electronics guys do their thing. For the first time I can actually imagine a state of completion where I am actually happy with the state of things. Its a bit off still but I can see the light!