Warderick Wells - Boativersary

Well we have officially owned the boat for an entire year as of today March 7 (not sure if this will post on the 7th or the 8th). One of the truisims that we have learned about boat ownership is that things break. A lot. Sometimes we break things (accidentally of course), sometimes nature breaks them, and sometimes they just get broken for reasons known only to themselves. We (meaning Kevin, obviously) are currently troubleshooting problems with two of our more important pieces of equipment.

The watermaker. Where do I begin? For those of you who aren't familiar with it, this little machine is supposed to take salt water and turn it into fresh. It sounds like magic, but it is really just using reverse osmosis to push the salt water through very small membranes to filter out the salt and other impurities. Then alacaZAM! you have fresh, potable water. When we bought the boat we were so excited because the model we have is supposed to output 16 gallons of freshwater an hour. That is enough water to take daily showers (one of our inalienable rights as Americans) as well as do the occasional load of laundry. We have recently discovered that due to issues with one of the pumps (why is it always the pump?), our watermaker is outputting only 3.7 gallons/hour. And that's on high output mode, when we run it on efficiency mode (to conserve electricity) it is even slower. Even on efficiency mode it draws a lot of power so we are concerned because we can't keep our water tank full without running the genset longer than we'd like to. I think Kevin has done all he can for this machine. It's 10 years old, parts of it leak a little, and it is looking like we need to at least replace one of the main pumps, which we will probably try to do once we get to Georgetown in April. Of course we will have to have it shipped from the states so that is a whole other tale which I won't bore you with. You know that rhyme about the US postal service, something to the effect of "neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor hail will stop the delivery of your mail"? Well in the Bahamas it doesn't snow, sleet, or hail, but their postal service leaves something to be desired.

The other item that has been a constant problem has been the wind generator. The wind generator is basically a windmill device that is supposed to charge up your battery bank whenever the wind blows more than 5 knots or so. When we are living "on the hook" (anchoring instead of tying up at marinas) we basically have three ways to keep our batteries fully charged: the wind generator (only works when it's windy), the solar cells (only work when it's sunny), and the genset (works as long as you have diesel in the tank). Ideally, we should be able to get enough juice between the wind generator and the solar cells that we shouldn't have to run the genset very often. However, our wind generator has never put out the amps that the company claims -- 5.5 amps in 10 knots, 11 amps in 15 knots). But what we are getting is more like 0 amps in 10 knots and it takes a steady 20 knots to even squeeze 5 amps out of it. We sent the generator back to the company for analysis and they said all was okay, but sure enough we kept getting the same low results. Kevin has gone over the wiring with a fine tooth comb and can't find anywhere where we might be "losing" amps, so we think it is the generator. We have been getting along okay with just the solar cells and the diesel generator, but it sure would be nice to have a generator that runs on one of the most readily available power sources here -- wind. Anyway, that is another item we will be looking into when we get to Georgetown.

Despite the issues, both of these things are non-critical pieces of equipment. If they are out of commission it doesn't impact our safety, or even our comfort. So we just add them to our ever-growing list of things that need attention and pour ourselves an ice-cold drink to celebrate our one-year boativersary. Now if the freezer ever crapped out on us, we would really be in trouble. Knock wood.