Day 339, Year 6: Dr. Dave
Date: Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Weather: Mostly Sunny and Warm
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
When we checked our email this morning we were pleasantly surprised to hear from Dave and Donna Laux. Dave was the guy who installed our Yanmar at the beginning of our voyage. He was brilliant-had solutions for everything and the know-how to get the jobs done. And he has been there for us a few times during our voyage when we were totally stumped about different issues. We call him Dr. Dave because he diagnoses boat problems just like a good physician. He thought he might be able to help with our electrical problems, but this time even Dr. Dave didn’t have a solution for us. He asked all the right questions and we have checked everything suggested, but our inverter/charger is still not charging our batteries. So Dr. Dave, thank you so much for being there for us. It was great talking to you. Stay tuned to see if we can actually get this problem solved. And if you have other suggestions, please send them our way. Mark spent the entire day checking and rechecking all connections and found nothing wrong. The only way we charged the batteries today was with a charger loaned to us by Buzz Harvey, the owner of Woods Hole Marine. We could have run the engine as we have been doing, but since we were at the dock with electricity, he offered the charger, and we gladly accepted the offer. In the afternoon, a frustrated Mark talked to a guy he knows through West Marine that works on boats and he thinks there might be a fuse in our inverter/charger that is blown. But Mark can’t find a fuse and we have no internal diagram. So again, we are stuck.
We have two different problems. One is that our AGM batteries seem to working at reduced capacity as they just don’t hold a charge as they should. So even when we run the engine until the batteries are fully charged, the charge doesn’t last very long. The batteries are three years old and might need an equalizing charge BUT we can’t do that without the boat’s battery charger working. So the inverter/charger is the second problem. It might have a blown fuse, or it might just be dead. Unfortunately no one was available today to check that out and we have to be on a dock with electricity to have this done. The slip Buzz is letting us use is rented as of tomorrow afternoon, so we have to go back to the mooring tomorrow morning. We think he has a place for us starting next week, so until then we will just keep running the engine morning and night. We will talk to Buzz tomorrow morning, but we think he might have an unexpected dock available starting next week until the middle of November when we move to Kingman Marine. If that is the case, we will take it so we can have heat when this lovely warm weather ends.
