Late yesterday we got the news that the windlass delivery will be a day later than originally scheduled. I wonder why they call it 3 day delivery if it has already taken 4 business days and is going to take an additional day on top of that? Oh well. The anchorage isn't costing us anything and Snooze is a great host.

Yesterday evening Snooze came out to visit us at the anchorage which was very pleasant. He came out to check and make sure that everything was OK for the night and stayed to socialize a wee bit. It's nice to be able to return his hospitality albeit in a small way. One of the pleasant things about this life style is that there is a return to an older fashioned means of entertainment and communications. You talk to one another.

Last night the front came through and we had a rather restless night at anchor with a Danforth and CRQ set deeply but still with the boat sailing about on her hooks the night was less than comfortable and a bit nerve racking. I kept getting up to check our bearings to make sure that we weren't dragging. I have visions of us waking up to the sound of our davits hitting one of the larger sport fisherman boats that line the canals here. Ouch, says our pocketbook. I know that we're insured but........

On the plus side, the wind has swung the boat so that we are a little closer to civilization and we are getting better internet contacts with our wifi antenna. The strongest wifi signal comes from someone who has a phone link to the internet so we can often contact the router but unless they have dialled in at the same time there is no connection and if they hang up mid posting or download for us.....too bad Nellekites. You lose! In closer there are several weaker signals but who have a broadband link from their server to the internet so we have a better connection. Plus, they tend to leave it up all the time.

On a different topic, last night I made an important discovery regarding multiple source charges for your battery banks on the boat. In particular if you have a charger that is controlled by one of those micro processor driven display units like we do with the Freedom 20 Charger/Inverter and the Link 2000 control unit it is vital to keep one important factor in mind if you are using a shore charge or a gas generator to provide 110VAC to the unit - the control unit decides what current to deliver based on the voltage that it detects across the positive and negative terminals on the battery bank. In a three stage charging system, charge, accept, float, it will deliver at a charge rate until it detects 28.8 VDC on the battery bank after which it goes to accept and then after a while it will go to float. If you also have say a wind generator on the system the controller will get confused. Why? Well that's because on a 24 Volt system the wind generator will produce well over 36 volts and if you have a 24 volt solar panel it can produce voltages of up to 40 volts. When the Link 2000 gets this it isn't fully aware of where it stands in the charging cycle so reduces the charge rate well before the batteries are fully charged. The answer is to turn off the wind generator and solar panel when you are using the gas generator or the engine to charge the batteries. I found that out last night a bit late in the evening so we spent a little longer awake than we normally do running the generator to get the batteries topped back up a bit. Even then we will probably have to do it again tomorrow too. For an engineering type like me it was really very interesting for the first time to really pay attention to the display on the Link 2000 as the generator was pumping amps into the battery bank. In the charge cycle it gradually builds up the voltage to 28.8 volts pushing between 40-50 amps at the bank. Then, once the magic 28.8 volts has been reached it switches to accept cycle and the voltage and the current gradually starts to decrease. The new threshold value is 26 volts at which point it will switch over to float where it will just provide an amp to the batteries to keep them topped up. I say this in the future tense since I didn't stay up last night to watch. To bagged, plus I knew that I wasn't going to have an easy night with maintaining an anchor watch during the wind.

I also discovered one feature about using the wind to keep the batteries charged - down here the wind tends to gust, so although the forecast might be for 20+ knots of wind the actuality is 0-20+ knots of wind and in a bay or close to shore like we are the wind will come from anywhere up to 30 degrees from one side and the other of the forecast direction. Add to that the boat sailing about on anchor and you get an extremely variable wind. The result is that the generator is constantly speeding up and dropping back down, sometime producing 0 amps and other times as much as 10! No, I am convinced that for the generator to work efficiently we need to find some way to lie constantly to the wind.

Not only that but I have also discovered that our 12 V inverter is drawing an extraordinary amount of power from the battery bank whenever one of the 12 V devices cuts in. A word of explanation: our house bank is 24 V but besides the fridge and water maker and one or two other 24 V devices we also have a raft of 12 V appliances aboard. I prefer 24 V units since you don't need as heavy wiring as the current draw is lighter, but in order to get the 12 V Nelleke came with a 24-12 V inverter and I had forgotten how costly those things are in power. Essentially to run a 2 A device the inverter provides power at 50% efficiency or 4 A are required to produce the 2 A at 12 volts. What a waste. I am presently looking at other options. One is to simply tap 12 V off either the upper or lower, preferably the lower for ground reasons, portion of the house bank. Another option is to have a separate battery bank for the 12 V system and set it up in parallel with the lower portion of the house bank. Both these ideas are workable but could have charging synchronization problems as the various power sources try to charge a battery bank that has more AHrs in the lower 12 V cells than in the higher.

Think. Plot. Ponder........

On another note, I got a telephone call from Dr. Judy Price this morning. Apparently when I called to give her the telephone number for the drug store I had transposed a couple of the numbers so she had been unable to get through. Great lady, instead of just waiting for me to call her back when there was no prescription forthcoming, she waited until she got into work this morning where she had my contact information and called me to sort things out. Whew! That's one thing that I didn't want to have to worry about too.

We visited the Suzuki dealer and got some oil for the outboard and a bunch of spare gaskets for the drain plug and have changed the oil. You can tell the difference in the engine noise. I had probably left it a little too long. The visit with the dealer was very interesting in that we got an idea of how difficult things are for guys like him in the keys. There are numerous competitors and the manufacturers do little to protect their dealers from unfair competition a lot of which comes from the internet. Tough life if you are trying to make a future for yourself and your family.

Barb tried out the hand washing machine with a reasonable amount of success this afternoon and did a buncha skivvies and tidy-whiteys, but all her stuff, none of mine. It worked but was a little more work than just popping them into a washing machine, but we didn't have to go ashore and there was a lot less carbon footprint involved.

And finally, last night we trotted out the laptops and watched one of our collection of movies. This time it was an old Peter Sellars Pink Panther movie, the Return of the Pink Panther. This was of particular interest as they have just finished a remake with Steve Martin as Clouseau and I wanted to refresh my memory with the original before we went to see the remake.
Fat Deer Cay, Florida