Hotel California
19 December 2009 | Red Hook, St. Thomas
kurt flock / warm, sunny, slight breeze
[New photo gallery uploaded 12/19/09: Messing Around Red Hook]
We're still hanging out in Red Hook on St. Thomas. It's Saturday morning, and we've walked the dog, had our omelette, and are now sitting at Lattes In Paradise, a funky, open air coffee joint on the second level of Red Hook Plaza. You can look out over the harbor and see St. John in the distance. The view's not half bad. Kate's new favorite drink here is a vanilla soy chai.
We're recovering from our date last night with margaritas and burgers at Duffy's Love Shack. I don't think Duffy's has a Zagat rating, but they serve some pretty awesome drinks and reasonably good food from a ramshackle building in the middle of a parking lot. They drag tables and chairs out onto the lot, and have at it. It seems to attract a combination of locals and tourists. We've been there several times before, so I guess we're somewhere in between.
We spent one New Year's Eve at the Love Shack with Kate's brother, Scott Davis. I vaguely remember drinking shots of Stoli by placing my open mouth at the bottom of this huge block of ice with sort of a luge course carved in it. The Stoli sluiced down the luge course picking up speed and a good chill before hitting the back of your throat. Only body shots can compete with this as drinking theatre, but I digress..
We've been dealing with typical boat stuff. I've gotten to know my Panda generator intimately over the last several days. The generator charges our batteries when we're not running the engine or hooked up to shore power. It's nice having 120 volts to power our two zone reverse cycle AC system, water heater, and trash compactor. These things don't run off the inverter. We don't have to have the engine or generator running to run other 120 volts stuff like computers, stereo, microwave, etc.. These run nicely off our new Outback inverter/charger which is hooked into our "house" batter bank. The house bank consists of four huge AGM batteries tied together to give us about 800 amps, of which you can only use about 50%. If you take amps out, you need to put 'em back, and most cruisers do this with some combination of running an engine, running a generator, or better yet, from a wind generator or solar panels. We don't have either wind or solar power generating capacity yet, so the generator is important. It's been quitting intermittently lately, and after standing on my head, messing with wires and OHM meters, and spending a lot of time on the phone with Fischer Panda folks in Florida, I've concluded the control panel is shot. That's today's project, once the FedEx guy who was supposed to get here yesterday gets here today with a replacement.
Yesterday, our dinghy motor gave it up on my way to the dock. After checking the fuel, filters, changing the spark plugs, and heating up the plugs with a torch, the damned thing still wouldn't start, so I gave up and loaded the 15 HP Yamaha into some guy's truck who agreed to haul it to some guy named Fred who could look at it "maybe on Monday". I'm still getting used to this "island time" thing that seems to downshift effectiveness and intentionality into some lower gear everywhere.
The dinghy motor gave out one day after a chafed area on tender blew out, affording me the opportunity to learn the fine art of executing a Hypalon patch. After roughing the tender up with 80 grit sandpaper and cleaning it with Toulene, I applied three coats of some adhesive to both the dinghy and the patch. So far I think it's holding. Now the dinghy is probably more important to Sophie than anyone, since she's gotten spoiled by her twice daily jaunts to shore where she can do her business. She's just not adapted well to the electric toilets on board Myananda.
So today we'll see if the Panda control panel comes, and if it does, whether that fixes our intermittent shut down issue. We'll see if the dinghy patch holds. We'll think about waxing the topsides and maybe polishing some stainless. Monday we may get our Yamaha back, and maybe the CMAP cartridge I ordered two weeks ago will arrive at Neptune's. And so it goes.