Day 54, Year 5: Power Struggle
Date: Saturday, December 19, 2009
Weather: Partly Sunny and Windy; E Winds 15-20
Location: Ao Chalong, Phuket, Thailand
Our little power struggle has gone on for days now. This started when we were in Ko Lanta on December 10. At first we were just getting erratic readings and then we discovered, while at Phi Phi Don, that our main alternator was not working. We replaced the faulty alternator with a less powerful back-up, and we thought things were fine except that we needed a new starting battery. We bought the new starting battery a couple of days ago and thought we had the problem solved, but today when we tried to start the engine-nothing. We can usually jump start it, but that didn’t even work today. So Mark got out Nigel Calder’s book, Boatowner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual, and this helped him trace the problem to the current issue. A side note here-No one should EVER go long-term cruising without this book. We had a short in the starter switch and that was somehow causing the new starting battery not to charge. We’re not sure we are at the end of this saga, but everything is finally charging beautifully. The next test will be whether or not the engine will start in the morning. We’ll report on that in tomorrow’s log.
I feel my first cruising article coming on. It will be about provisioning for the trek across the Indian Ocean. Mark and I worked together today to really figure out just how much food we really do need. We have been using past experience as our guide so far and even when we know we need to buy more, we have been reluctant. It just seems so crazy to buy 40 cans of green beans at one time, so we have been buying a few of this and a few of that each time we go shopping. We decided that this is silly and we needed to do a spreadsheet to help us understand what we really need. Breakfast cereal is the really crazy one. We eat homemade granola six days out of seven. Or we substitute Grapenuts when they are available. But the cost of Grapenuts here is outrageous (but you can get them at the Villa Market) so we decided to figure out just how much we are spending on making our own granola. In this part of the world you buy rolled oats (when you can find them) in 750 gram bags. That is seven cups of oats. Each of us will eat a half cup of granola each morning, so when all of the figuring was done we now know we need to buy 25 more packages of rolled oats plus more honey, oil, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, to make enough granola for the next ten months. That is when we should reach South Africa where we can buy most anything we need. We did this same calculation for all of our other staples and unfortunately the shopping list is growing and growing. But at least we now really know what we need. The days of avoiding reality are over. We know we can buy certain staples in India (rice, vinegar, spices, eggs) and then we can buy cheese, eggs, and fresh fruits and veggies once we reach Mauritius. But there is a three month gap between India and Mauritius, so we need to fill that gap. And then things like canned vegetables and rolled oats are hard to come by anywhere in the Indian Ocean, even southern India, so those things have to be bought here. We are recording everything we have onboard and will be very interested to see what is left when we reach South Africa. I know we won’t starve, but I think we will get very creative.
It is a bit rocky and rolly here with the Northeast monsoon winds blowing, but we have had no rain and the anchor seems to be securely in place. We will spend another day onboard tomorrow and then head to town early on Monday morning for our first Christmas call with Justin, Jo, and Ziggy. We actually put up our Christmas tree today. Now ‘Christmas tree’ is a bit of a stretch, but we wound artificial garland around our compression post and we will now start to decorate it. At this point it only has the enameled elephant we bought in Singapore last year. We gave that same ornament to our kids and grandkids and to Kevin and Claire. So at this point, we all have one thing in common. Tomorrow I’ll tie red bows all around the ‘tree’ and on Monday when we go shopping we will see what else we can find. I have some tiny red and green hot peppers, and I think I will string those as a garland around the garland.
