Whelp, it wasn’t the right fix. Lots of troubleshooting on Saturday morning to hone various considerations that it wasn’t, and yet still no charging. (For those interested in the nitty-gritty: the alternator has both an internal and an external regulator, and as it was bench-tested with only the internal in use (the external remained installed back aboard the boat), it could be that the external regulator either has wiring issues, or is somehow otherwise faulty. We (ha! I’m hilarious… Andy) can bypass the external regulator, but it’ll take some doing, so he’s trying to tick off the easier possibilities first). At one point it began charging, for about 20 minutes, and then went back to its old gremlin-y trick of.. not. So perhaps a nod to loose wiring? Not wanting to spent the majority of his short trip with his head in the engine compartment, we decided to make a break from the yard while it was the weekend and we weren’t getting any help anyway, and live our Chickadee lives to the fullest. Who needs refrigerated things? (Umm..)
Also? Our head pump needs replacing, as it’s leaking salt water all over the place every time we pull or push the plunger. I was hopeful that a seal had dried out and needed some moisture to cajole it into leak-free function, but.. not yet anyway. Boats. The best, right?
We had a really beautiful sail to Manjack Cay, just north of Green Turtle, and anchored in time to be able to use the fairly high tide to dinghy through the mangroves to see what we could see. An eagle ray was the first to greet us when heading in, and from there it was a lot of turtles flying this way and that, and a couple of barracudas way up in, snaking their way along the edges of the mangroves, no doubt great fishing for a top osteicthyes predator. We’ll go back again today to see things with better light above, and also perhaps hit up Brendal’s beach, where the stingrays flock for handouts, and bang up on your shins for our amusement and their begging purposes.
I wrote that first bit earlier, and we ended up scrapping the plan for the second round of mangrove exploring when we missed a high enough tide, and instead went in to the ‘cruiser’s beach’, and hiked to the other side to play on the ocean beach. Manjack is where Andy acquired his first experience with poison wood, so we were quite diligent in our surroundings assessments, especially as we squeezed tighter and tighter in various parts of the trek over. The girls in fact named it the “Death Path”, which I thought a wee bit extreme, but it kept us on our toes as we had to duck and dodge various limbs and leaves stretching out over the trail. (As a reminder, poison wood is poison ivy’s evil stepmother: its oily secretions can bring on blisters you wished you’d never known, and whose secretions then spread and spread for more blistery suffering.. a real treat for whomever gets it, to be sure.)
The walk was worth it, to no one’s surprise. An expansive beach to ourselves, and one with ‘perfect pitch’ to boot; it’s always nice to find a spot to flop around in the waves where you aren’t getting threshed by giant rollers, but with enough wave action to keep the kids happy.
We headed back to the boat for lunch, and then a quick jaunt back here to Green Turtle, where we now sit on the dock at AYS (Abaco Yacht Service, our home away from home), awaiting today’s: a)access to an electrician, b)WiFi for downloading a few movies and c)laundry.
Our hope is to have the first crack at Rand, the electrician who will hopefully help us with the alternator, because ICE IS IMPORTANT. Oh right, and water pressure, starting the engine, lighting, charging devices and other such mundane things… Then off around the whale for some Guana exploration, most likely.
