Adventure In Moving
09 April 2012 | Falmouth Harbour, Antigua
Jeff
As you might have observed by the header of this post, we have not moved to a different harbor. We have merely changed our location to another part of Falmouth Harbour. This seed for moving was planted in my brain yesterday while we were pulling up some of the chain to clean the marine growth off of it. As I cleaned the chain I noticed what appeared to be abrason on the galvanized coating of the chain. As this part of the chain was likely in contact with the bottom I was concerned that something on the bottom of the harbor was damaging the chain's coating. Also, in recent days I thought that I had been hearing the chain dragging over something. The only answer was to try anchoring in a different location. As we pulled up the chain using our electric windlass it's circuit breaker repeatedly tripped requiring Pam to reset it each time. We did this until the anchor was almost all the way up at which time the breaker tripped without immediately after upon my depression of the windlass activation switch. Not a good sign. The last time that this happened was back in the early 1990's, not long after our purchase of Foggy, and then it turned out to be a bad windlass motor. At this point our re-anchoring process was interrupted by one of my venting by throwing one of my now patented "I can't deal with another broken piece of equipment temper tantrums". After the smoke cleared I hauled the rest of the chain and the anchor up by hand and we got the anchor back down and set in the new location. After troubleshooting the windlass I determined that the windlass motor is bad. When we replaced the motor back in the early 90s it cost arounf $500 just for the motor so we weren't feeling too good about the prospect of having one shipped into Antigua especially with our unresolved IRS issues. The windlass motor is not an off the shelf deal but it might be able to be repaired locally by a motor repair technician. However, after a closer inspection of the motor's condition I believe that that rust has severly compromised the case of the motor. So, it looks like a replacement of the motor will be necessary. Until then it looks like I my back and arm muscles will be getting a workout.