Boat Projects

We haven’t dragged anchor, lost an engine, or ripped the bowsprit off the front of the boat this time, but we have had a couple mishaps and a few boat projects.  The biggest problem we’ve had is the seizing of our solar array supports.  On Exodus, the major way we get power is through three 250 W solar panels that you can manually rotate fore and aft to track the sun (so we have our best sun days if we are pointing East or West, and since we are still in the Northern hemisphere, pointing North isn’t too bad either.)   Since we don’t have a generator, the only other way to charge the batteries is with the engines, which works fine, but adds wear and tear on the engines.  At this point, we haven’t had to run the engines just to charge batteries, but then the solar array supports seized, and we couldn’t rotate them.  Basically, each side is just two hollow stainless steel poles and you move the outer one up and down on the inner one to rotate the panels.  Tim took everything apart when we were in Santa Rosalia, and tried many different things, but couldn’t get the poles to move freely against each other, and by this time, both sides were seized.  He ended up getting new poles made when we were in San Diego, so now the old outer pole is the new inner pole, and they seem to be working well so far.

We had a couple sailing projects to work on in Santa Rosalia.  First, when tacking we tore the bottom of the gennaker, so our new standard practice is to furl/unfurl the gennaker when we tack or jibe.  The other was the mainsail stack pack.  Marsha had sewn one side while she was here, and now the other side was torn.  Unfortunately, we weren’t with Star Passage anymore and Kim’s awesome sewing machine, but there is never a shortage of helpful cruisers.  Dan from Dazzler not only loaned his sewing machine but came and did the sewing as well.  It only cost us a few beers.

Also, while in Santa Rosalia we had a little issue with our shore power connection.   The power often goes out there, and one time after coming back on, we were no longer getting power to the boat.  Tim called our resident electrical engineer, Steve from Lady Carolina, and of course, Dan from Dazzler came down to help too.  They troubleshot for a while, and finally figured out it was a breaker in Alex’s room that would blow when the water heater was on.   It just happened to be the breaker that Tim kept insisting wasn’t attached to anything, just leftover stuff from previous installations, so it took them a while to figure it out.  We still aren’t sure what’s wrong with the water heater, we just haven’t used it since then.

There is always something that needs to be fixed on a boat.  Relatively speaking, we have it pretty easy since we have a pretty new boat, but there’s always a balance to be struck between preventive and corrective maintenance.  I’ve been doing a lot of reading since being out here, and I’ve found some resources that give decent outlines of what should be done when from a preventive perspective.  So, I built a spreadsheet that lists maintenance tasks, by boat system, with the frequency it should be done, and then had it flag things that were overdue.  I forced Tim to sit down and go through it with me to add his take, and now we are better organized and know what needs to be done when.  Of course, I’m pretty sure Tim hasn’t cracked the spreadsheet since.  Oh well, you can bring a horse to water…  I think I’ll work more on my provisioning spreadsheet because I definitely use that