After a few days of rain and high winds things have settled back into more seasonable weather. It appears weather reports in the southern states are differ than back home.

https://youtube.com/shorts/cX4X_xIMP_g?si=eb9f39-mbUg7NpVr

There was a couple of days when a few boats made the crossing from Florida so the marina is filling up. We get temperatures in the mid 20's during the day and it cools down to the low teens at night so it great for sleeping. I check our outdoor security cameras at home and see what it's like there so no complaints on our end!

Went snorkelling at the outer reef and had tons of fish coming up to us. The fish were coming right up to us on the surface this day so we're guessing they had missed being fed by the resort dive boat due to the weather preventing trips out there over the past few days. We didn't have any food for them but they sure did like coming up to see if we did. The boarding ladder I made for the dinghy worked pretty well for getting back into the boat as well.

On Saturday we walked to the $2 bar, a shack along the beach road just west of us about a 20 minute walk away. Not sure by the name for the place as nothing we could see there was $2 but the food and drinks were reasonably priced and the view was great. We had a couple of dogs accompany us back to our place and we weren't sure if they were strays or not. It appeared that it was a mother and her half grown pup, both appearing to be in good health, happy, playful and well fed. They seemed to be road smart as well and the pup had the same markings and colour combination as Finn did and it was all we could do not to pat him or pay him any attention. We needed the security guard to keep both of them away from the gate so we could go into the resort and keep them out.

If you have been following along with our adventures you may have picked up on the fact that boats require a fair amount of work and maintenance to function properly. Preventative maintenance is a great way to stack the deck in your favour so you don't have a breakdown in some remote place/bad weather conditions/tight confines or any combination of those 3.

With that in mind I decided to service our starboard cabin top winch which is used to raise and lower the gib and mainsail as well a couple of other sail control lines. This is a 2 speed winch which is operated by inserting a handle in the top. The line to retracted is wound around the drum 2-3 times and when the handle is rotated clockwise it winds the sail halyard around the drum and raises the sail. When it gets too tough to crank it can be rotated counter clockwise and rotates at half the speed making it easier to crank under heavier loads. It is also a self talking winch which means it has a spring loaded slot on the top of it which keeps tension on the line so it doesn't slide backwards as the load increases. It's a pretty neat feat of engineering for operation is a fairly harsh environment. But in its current condition it was getting even harder, and noisier to crank under load.

That being said, that winch, 1 out of 5 we have on the boat, was binding a bit when we first got the boat and wasn't getting any easier to turn as time went on. I downloaded the manual which shows the exploded parts view as a guide to take it apart and reassemble. The are 4 little, and I mean little, springs in the winch which operate the ratchet system (the clicking noise like a socket wrench handle or the gears on your bicycle) so the tension on the drum doesn't pull the line back as it is cranked. So let's just say you have to be verrrry careful when disassembling the winch so as not have 1 or more of these fly out. It's an unwritten law of boating that anything dropped will naturally fall overboard (think of tools, hardware, sunglasses, cell phones etc) and these springs have the added bonus of being able to jump in any direction when released from being under load. I experienced this a few years back with our boat Haida when a spring tried to jump ship when I pulled the drum off the winch. Fortunately I eventually found it several feet away at the back of the cockpit but lesson learned.

Got the unit dissembled and found that I actually had to remove the entire unit from the deck to get part of the gearing mechanism out to clean. It appeared that 1 gear cluster was binding but I wasn't sure why. After reading the manual though I found that Tartan has installed the winch in the wrong position in relation to the direction the loaded line contacted the drum. After a solvent bath and lithium ( it's not just in our batteries) grease application I reassembled and remounted the winch in the proper orientation to the line and it is winding almost effortlessly with all springs present and accounted for I might add. Check 1 more thing off the list!

https://youtu.be/EXq_EkNHggg?si=u1d9jY3PpwWaFgrQ

Thanks for following along on our adventures over the past 3 months ( seems like a lot longer to me for some reason). We're planning our departure from here to explore the Exuma Island chain possibly sometime in January. This is a more remote chain of islands a couple of hundred miles south of here with a lot of beautiful beaches and fantastic snorkelling reefs so stay tuned for that.

Merry Christmas from Sam and Bill.