Up the mast I go
09 December 2017 | 09 44.542N::-084 59.35W
Bill
Last night, as the sun went down, we made sure to turn on our anchor light so others could tell we were here. It didn't come on. The navigation light as well as the flashing light that is built into the fixture came on just fine so since we have had the problem before, we knew it was a somewhat loose wire connection. I was going to have to go up the mast and relieve the gravitational pull on the wires. Did it before and I guess it was time to do it again. I grabbed my biggest zip ties, wire cutters and some screw drivers and the bosuns chair with Tracys help and our huge Milwaukee drill and the steps I installed on the mast 9 years ago, up I went. The big Papagayo winds hadn't quite kicked in so I was only in the occasional 10-15 knot winds. I climbed as Tracy used the big drill to help pull me up. Once up there, I took out the zip ties and wrapped one around the wire that goes down the inside of the mast and then zipped it closed. Took out two even bigger zip ties and joined them into one huge zip and slid it through a hole in the top of the mast and zipped it closed, taking the downward pull off the wires. I put my hands around the fixture and the light came on. It's on a photo cell that turns it on automatically when the sun goes down. All fixed and I started coming back down the mast. A few days ago as we unhappily motored(instead of sailing)we found that our "steaming" light wasn't coming on so I took a spare bulb(can't have enough spares) up with me and screw drivers to take off the cover. Once I was down to the fixture, I had Tracy turn it on and it worked just fine. what we thought was a problem wasn't. Once back on deck and our bag of tools put away, we unlocked, and uncovered the generator, filled her tank with gasoline and with one pull, she started right up(hooray for Yamaha!!)and she's putting volts back into our battery as I type this. It's also charging a multitude of electronic gadgets whos batteries were a bit low. We are back in the cruise mode again. The winds are starting to blow and we just had a spat of 22 knots come across the boat. It's going to be a fun few days as we wait out the oncoming Papagayo winds.