Lee Stocking Island - Inherit the Wind

Well the northerly winds have been pretty strong for the past few days, bringing with them some cooler weather. Today Kevin decided to take a second look at our broken wind generator (windmill-looking-thingy) and see if we couldn't do something about it to get some power out of it. He had already looked at all the electrical connections, no problem there. And he had already sent the generator (without the blades) back to the company for analysis and they couldn't find anything wrong with it. But it had gotten a little banged up back in the Berry Islands and was now way out of whack and wouldn't generate much of anything. So Kevin took it down and took the whole thing apart to try to see if maybe balancing it could help. Balancing the blades is kind of like balancing a new ceiling fan only more complicated. Our wind generator only has two blades but we discovered that one was out of alignment by 1/4 inch, which is probably why the thing made such an awful racket when it was spinning. So after a couple hours of undoing bolts, following the steps in the manual, and re-bolting everything together, the blades were a lot closer in alignment, probably as close as we can get them. Kevin put the whole thing back together and back up on top of the bimini and we both held our breath and crossed our fingers. Success! (Well, sort of.) The blades spun evenly and quietly so that was great but when we checked we were still only getting about 5 amps in 15 knots of wind (we are supposed to get 10 amps). But at least we are now able to trickle-charge the batteries when the wind blows at night and we get the bulk of our charge out of the solar cells during the day.

Also for anyone wondering, we have a resolution to the Cay vs. Island debate. You'd think I might have known, since in college I took the "hard" sciences: astronomy and geology. Only I was super lazy and took the HISTORY of Geology 102 course instead of the Intro 101 course where you learn all this stuff; I can't tell the difference between silicates and silicone, mica and formica. But luckily Dar looked it up online and sent us this from the encyclopedia:
Islands: Oceanic islands can result from volcanic islands rising above the water, esp on or near a mid-ocean ridge. Oceanic islands may also be the emergent tips of volcanoes formed by hotspots.
Cays: Formed when tidal action, wind and sea birds deposit, over a long period of time, coral debris and sand onto reef flats.
So our guess is that "Lee Stocking Island" is a misnomer, since there has never been any volcanic activity in this area and there is no tectonic activity in this region. Plus the "island" is made of limestone with sandstone hills, which sounds more like the encyclopedia's description of "cay". Thus endeth the science lesson.