Day 70 january 9, 2012
Today was a work day. I started by taking off our alternator to give to a alternator guy here in Marathon. He said my old alternator probably could not put out enough current to fully recharge my batteries as I had suspected. So, he suggested a 95AMP alternator for a replacement and to upgrade my cable size for the new alternator. The problem that has been happening is not uncontrollable. But, I figured after anchoring out all night and a good days run to our next stop, that the alternator would recharge my batteries to full state before we anchored for the night. That has not been the case. So, our fall back plan is the 2000w Honda portable generator to recharge the batteries via the 2500 watt Inverter/charger. It does a great job in about 2 hours. The Honda 2000s are very popular down here on boats. And you have to have some recharge method while on a mooring ball. Most boats have solar panels and wind generators both. I thought about installing a wind generator. But then we realize we are not going to be operating our boat back in the Chesapeake in the same manner as down here. The cost of solar and wind generation will buy lots of gasoline for the Honda. For the people LIVING on a mooring (some have been here 18 years per the dockmaster) wind and solar make sense. But for us the generator and a better alternator would be a better choice. The new alternator should be the trick for the way we operate our boat. It should recharge everything during a days run with no need for the generator to run. We will see. At least I will have a spare generator in case one a failure.
Second thing was to sand some more of our teak brightwork. Those of you that have seen our boat knows it has character with all the teak. But it was the last thing on my list to work on. But sitting here on the mooring ball with a nice breeze and mid 70ºs seems like a nice time to work on it. Susan has been working on cleaning the hull and mustache that has accumulated on the bow from the dinghy. It is coming along nicely.
Todays picture is actually a moonlit picture of the Boot Key Harbor.