Birvidik

In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Reading the previous couple of entries it could well be argued that we have either been disingenuous or seriously lax in doing our homework. Anyone with half a brain should have researched the area thoroughly and prepared for the known expenses, which were hardly a state secret.

We plead Not Guilty. We had planned to moderate the expense of cruising the area by spending much of our time in the more isolated anchorages. The limiting factors here are water and electricity. A watermaker was out of the question so we bought extra jerry cans to increase our capacity and to enable us to take the dinghy to more remote taps and fill up as necessary.

Our one year old batteries gave us a capacity of a comfortable 420 AH, but even this starts to suffer after a few days at anchor, despite the contributions of the solar panel and the wind generator. In preparation we had lashed out nearly a grand on a 1 KW petrol generator so we could keep the batteries topped up.

The technical and logistics wonks amongst you will have realised by now that success in our plans was contingent upon a number of techie systems all working in co-ordination. They will also be very aware of Sod's Law and its Corollaries.

The water supply system required Jerry cans, sources of water, a working dinghy and a working outboard for the more distant anchorages. Well, jerry cans - What can possibly go wrong with jerry cans I hear you ask. Well, since you ask, I'll tell you what can possibly go wrong with jerry cans. They can degrade from UV exposure and fall apart when you heave them from the dinghy to the stern platform, that's what. Sources of water mentioned in the pilot were frequently well hidden or locked, but we still managed. Then the outboard packed up. This seriously limited our water gathering activities.

I tried threatening it with outsized shifting spanners and hitting it with progressively larger hammers but to no avail. We resorted to Newbury's Corollary to Sod's Law, namely There are few problems that can't be solved if you throw enough money at them. The difficulty here is determining how much money you can afford to throw at it. We looked into the cost of a replacement outboard in Croatia - 960 quid. In the UK the very same engine could be had for £550, so it looks like I'm going to be doing a lot more rowing until we get back to Lefkas. Expect photographs of me with forearms like Popeye's.

Keeping a reservoir of electrical energy needs a different set of prerequisites, namely a range of charging systems and a good solid battery bank to accept and lovingly care for all this charge. All of these we had - Solar, wind, shore power, engine driven and petrol generator charging. You couldn't build in more redundancy.

Note though that they all, with the exception of shore power, require the aforementioned good, solid battery bank. This we had, eight bloody great batteries, bought only a year ago. These were Rolls batteries, the supposed crème de la crème of electrical storage and priced accordingly at an exorbitant £2 000+.

Come the Achilles Heel, come the arrow. The batteries, over the course of the first six weeks cruising, progressively went into sulks and refused to accept charge. Despite our history of religious battery maintenance and charging I had to isolate sections of the bank at about fortnightly intervals until we are currently reduced to one bank of two batteries. This should nominally hold 110 AH which should be enough to power everything on the boat in profligacy for about five days. In their current state they will just about power a single Christmas tree lamp at a dull glimmer for 2 ½ minutes.

Under these circumstances we are left with two options, keep the engine running 24/7, or plug into shore power. Hence our unexpected outlay on mooring fees. We're currently in Vela Luka on Korcula and will be hiring a car tomorrow so that we can drive to Korcula town and pick up four new batteries which will knock us back about 800 quid. Should take us about eight weeks to recover that in saved mooring fees.

Shame we're only going to be in Croatia for another fortnight.