Day 361, Year 6: More Electrical Problems
Date: Thursday, October 20, 2011
Weather: Partly Sunny and VERY Windy, Gusts to 40 knots
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts

Do the problems never end? We seem to be having one little boat or car problem after another. Tonight the issue is the inverter . . . again. A new inverter/charger is on order, but won’t arrive until next week. So in the meantime, we just have to make do. Tonight’s problem was a new one. All of sudden the inverter was buzzing and we were getting no reading on the volt meter. The pass-through switch in the inverter that should automatically allow shore power to flow into the system was not working. We’re all back to normal now, but since we don’t know what caused the problem, who knows when it will return. We’re just hoping that things will settle down by Monday when Mark leaves for the conference he is attending as I am surely not the handyman that he is. When we lived aboard in Boston, Mark was traveling a great deal and I can remember trying to deal with similar issues. Not easy. I love living aboard, but without my very own Mr. Fix-it, I don’t think I could do this.

Our new alternator regulator has been installed for a while but it has been using default values instead of being properly adjusted for our battery bank. Today Mark spent a great deal of time trying to adjust it. He bundled all the wires he has recently run for the new system monitor and wire tied them to keep them neat. He also cleaned the back of the hull where the diesel exhaust comes out and constantly leaves a gray area. We started the day fixing another problem. Mark had to go up the mast to deal with the flags we put up to shoo away the birds. One of them fell during the night and he needed to sort out the lines. While up there, he put a new block on the top of the mast and ran the spinnaker halyard through it. This is the one that broke on the way to Nantucket. So now we have no flags up but we do have a spinnaker halyard.. If the horde of birds are back in the morning, then we will have to raise those flags again. The heating and air conditioning repair man came while Mark was up the mast. Instead of a leak in the system being the problem, he thinks the relay that starts the compressor is bad. Unfortunately he didn’t have one and has to order a new one. Once that comes in next week we’ll find out if that is the only problem or if there are other issues.

I don’t even want to go into the car issues we have been having, but the bottom line is that the car goes in tomorrow morning for repairs and hopefully after that it will pass inspection. On the positive side, it was warm today and Sam and Jonah were absolutely delightful. Ziggy also brought sunshine into our lives today. Mark got a notice that Justin and Jo had posted some photos of Ziggy on Facebook, so we went in to have look. Ziggy evidently fell in love with a pair of pink boots with a furry lining. The photos of him in his diaper and pink boots were adorable.