It's been over a month since our last post. We have been slack but there are plenty of things to distract us:
A. Christmas and all the preparations that go with it including visiting the grandparents and cutting wood in preparation for the wood fired oven to be running for 72 hours straight.
B. Children's end of year concerts, birthday parties and presentations
C. An absolutely mad amount of travel for work and the associated workload
Excuses aside we have managed to achieve a lot during this time. Mostly done at opportune times for ordering parts over the internet. We have ordered the parts to put a sailing rig on the dinghy from America and Melbourne. Ordered 400 watts of solar panels and a serious controller for them, both being sent from Melbourne. Mounting hardware and fuse blocks from America. All this was done in preparation for our Christmas break on the boat. My plan was to complete these projects when I could,if I could.
Lucky we had all the parts for these two projects on board with us, including the two huge solar panels because on the way up to Pittwater I noticed that although the motor was running at 2800 rpm there was no charge going into the batteries. I had suspected that there was a problem for a while but on our last outing the battery was charging fine from the alternators and had assumed the problem was only my imagination. (The starter battery is charged via another alternator and charge controller) Not so, and now we had no way to charge the house bank, two full fridges and a full freezer. I had no intention of spending my weeks holiday at a marina and quickly got to work troubleshooting. First thought was that the belt was slipping, so i rang my father who was coming to visit in 3 days and asked if he could bring some new belts. I couldn't find an obvious answer and started thinking of alternatives.
The answer in my mind was that I had to get the solar system wired in ASAP and within a couple of hours we had a functional solar system recharging the batteries and completely independent of the other charging methods. Setup in parallel the panels put in 110 amps on the first full day and 54 Amps on the 4th day which was overcast and very little sunshine. Good enough to keep us away from the dock. With the new belt installed there was still no charge. So out came all the books i had bought about troubleshooting and maintenance while dreaming of owning a boat big enough to cruise for long periods. After following all the possible causes it ended up being a dead alternator, something internal was not functioning correctly. So we were stuck with solar. It was a lovely peaceful couple of days.
My only problem now was that during the installation I had shorted across the terminals by brushing a spanner to close to the opposite terminal. This caused the battery monitor to loose its amp hour readings and no longer provide a state of charge reading. Literature said the battery was still at 60% charge but the monitor only read 25% and I was not going to risk the two very large and expensive batteries being run empty and suffering long term damage. So I had to come up with a method of charging the batteries up so I could reset the meter at 100% charge. So I removed the faulty alternator and connected up the battery charging cables to the starter motor alternator and ran the batteries up to 13.6 volts and allowed the solar charger to the the rest. Problem solved and another task added to the list. Replace house battery alternator and reset the charge controllers for the house and starter banks.
The next task for the holiday was to fit an optimist rig and foils onto the walker bay 8 we had inherited from my father. So out came the hand tools and within a Couple of hours we had a complete set of foils trial fit and ready to be varnished. It was good to be creating something and working with my hands. Two coats of varnish applied in the afternoon and everything was ready to be installed in the morning. Another hours work and we had a sailing dinghy. William and I went for a test sail in the lightest of breezes and I can confirm that it did actually sail. It brought back the memories of all the good times I had when I was just 5 or 6 years old and would sail the dinghy that my father had put together for me in the same bay as Will and I took that first test sail. Olivia didn't take long to want to join in and then there was 3 of us...
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