Kaimusailing

The next day after our return from Ft. Lauderdale was a day of laundry, picking up shipments at the boatyard office, and a trip to Luigi’s, a local pizza restaurant, for lunch, and all you can eat Italian buffet. After that I shopped to get groceries, prior to the delivery I tried to use up any perishable food, now the larder was bare.
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The Miata had a flat tire, one that had a slow leak and needed to be pumped up every few days. I couldn’t drive the car to the boatyard machine shop where there was plenty of sailboat fuel (air) and my little plug in air pump wasn’t working. Fortunately most of the yardbirds have plenty of repair tools in their vehicles and the tire was quickly pumped up.
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After running errands all day I felt extremely fatigued. I noticed that when I closed my eyes I felt like I was back on the boat. I needed visual reference to keep from falling over. This is kind of like the reverse of seasickness, you have to get your shore legs back.
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The photos from the delivery trip were posted on flickr and I caught up on correspondence in my email inbox.
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Among the shipments that came in were a replacement dremel-like rotary tool by Black and Decker, the RTX, and a dozen AA and AAA eneloop batteries. I now had a pile of new stuff including my purchases at Harbor Freight. I could begin work on the hull bottoms right away.
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My choice of weapons to chip off the old bottom paint was an angle grinder wheel that looks like it has chain saw teeth around the perimeter. I had an old dull one of these on the old angle grinder and it was impossible to remove it, so I left it on there and sharpened it with diamond burr bits in the rotary tool. I also had a new angle grinder and a new chainsaw grinding wheel and put them together. The paint dulls the teeth rather quickly, so a grinding/chipping session is a pass with each grinder, then a sharpening session. An additional angle grinder with a 40 grit flap disc was used to remove paint that didn’t respond to the chipping action.
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I also used the new rotary tool to cut apart the Standard Horizon hand held VHF’s battery. The battery was dead and I thought I could use the carcass to modify the replacement alkaline battery tray so that I could charge the eneloop cells that were in the tray using the charge cradle. What I found was that the charging cradle was putting out 9 volts and the original battery was 7.5 volts. The alkaline tray was meant for 1.5 volt cells, five of them producing 7.5 volts total. The eneloops are 1.2 volt cells, so the battery tray would be running at 6 volts. I didn’t feel confident that the higher cradle voltage wouldn’t ruin the eneloop cells, so I abandoned the little project.
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I had originally purchased 8 eneloop cells to get the 5 I needed for the radio. The cells came on sale in quantity of 12, so I bought 12 AAA’s and 12 AA’s. The old Garmin GPS and the SPOT tracking device use AA’s. I now had 20 AAA’s total, that would power the radio 4 times over.
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When we were relying on this radio on the delivery, the battery icon on the operating screen looked like the batteries were nearly dead. Of course the eneloops are going to give a lower voltage and low battery indication, but I wasn’t sure how low they were. We had begun to use the radio only for distant NOAA weather reports, which it did better than the other radios. The rest of the time it was turned off. Reading the operator’s manual showed that the battery icon is only shown on the operating screen when the batteries are very low. In fact, when I tested the radio for about an hour it got low enough to have a battery warning. After recharging the eneloops, the battery icon was no longer displayed, meaning the battery voltage was above the low battery threshold. Having extra sets of spare batteries means we can use this radio in the future for more than a few days, plus we can recharge the batteries in the eneloop charger which has both AC and DC adapters.
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The old West Marine VHF55 was nearly dead and I would hesitate to use it at all, but it very slowly recharged in its cradle so that there were 2 out of 3 bars on the battery icon. I guess this radio could be kept in its charge cradle and used intermittently if necessary. The charge cradle is no longer available and isn’t working properly, but it will keep the radio at a usable charge level, as long as the radio spends most of its time in the charge cradle.
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We are scheduled for another two deliveries, back to back, I will be involved in both, taking a Beneteau 50 from Dominican Republic to Miami, then picking up another Lagoon catamaran in Ft. Lauderdale and taking it to Mississippi. My electronics will now travel with me in a computer soft case. I will probably bring the Getac this time, it has a better daylight screen and is waterproof. We will use the same SPOT device. I have about 2 weeks before leaving on these deliveries, which will also take about 2 weeks to complete.
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I thought we would be using Luperon in Dominican Republic as the port where I would join the boat, but no, it will be in Punta Cana. I did my research based on Luperon initially and found a harbor map made by an ex-pat who provided a lot of information about Luperon online. He also provided an article he wrote for Soundings magazine concerning a delivery he made from Luperon to Ft. Lauderdale. Oh boy, just what I need. It turned out to be a very amusing two part article, provided no advice applicable to a standard delivery, just piled on anecdote after anecdote of a worst case delivery. It is at: http://www.thornlesspath.com/delivery.pdf
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The replacement cell phone died on the delivery and was resuscitated using the skipper’s charger. Now it has died again and I tried everything to get it recharged. It would blink red at the charge indicator which is normally solid red when charging and green when complete. I ended up finding a combination of AC adapter and micro USB cable that recharged the phone. Whew.
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The image is dawn at Beach Marine at Jacksonville Beach on the last delivery.