Finishing the haulout

After relaxing and touring, it was back to work! Monday we moved to another place, again about 3 km away from RC.

This place had a pool, making it easier to handle the heat. I rented a bike to make the trip to RC easier. Still not trivial, including a hill at the end that was steep enough I did not feel safe riding the bike down the hill and could not possibly pedal it up (a one-speed).

Another plus for the second place is that the neighbor next door had two very friendly cats! Here we see Peggy and ‘Fluffy’ (our name for her) enjoying time together.

This is a view into an area where much of the electronics dealing with the batteries, solar, AC to DC, etc. lives. In about the center of the photo is a silver ‘busbar’ (with green, red, yellow and blue tape on it) where the negative connections from the house batteries terminate. It turns out that when this was installed in mid 2020 in San Diego, the connections were never tightened. Over the years, this caused the connections to slowly develop more and more resistance. First, this is really dangerous because it could cause a fire. Second, it wastes energy because all the electricity is going through a resistor that only produces heat, no useful work, lighting, refrigeration, etc. Over time I had been noticing that something was not right in the system but it took me months of looking at various areas before I found the problem here. Luckily, the fix was just to open up the connections, wire-brush them clean and then tighten them down. This fixed the problem!

There are many other items I worked on. The list includes replacing the traveler line, adding backing to port and stbd padeyes that hold blocks for the downwind sheets, tightening fan belts, replacing both starter motor relays, got a propane tank refilled, adding sensors to our water tanks (so we know how full they are without having to open them and look inside), getting a sailbag repaired and many other items. There was also constant interfacing with people working on the boat, doing engine work (replacing the saildrive seals) waxing and polishing (the fiberglass exterior needs waxing to prevent sun damage) and fixing numerous small dings in the gelcoat (coating over the fiberglass), etc.

One problem that took a lot of time – our autopilot stopped working a few days earlier. I had thought it might be due to the electrical problem I described earlier, but fixing that problem did not fix the autopilot. After two solid days of debugging, I stumbled upon a blog post where someone had a similar problem and it was due to a software upgrade not completing. I had done software upgrades for a number of devices a few days before we noticed the autopilot problem. So I went through the process of ‘recovery and redownload’ for the device and it worked! 🙂 It had been looking like I was going to have to replace the unit. At $1700 and several weeks of shipping, that was not a fun thought. So I was VERY happy and relieved to have this easy (and free (except for my two days of work!)) fix.

I have to say I was quite happy with the work done by the people at Raiatea Carenage. Good quality work and the people were easy to work with. Not inexpensive, but that’s French Polynesia.

After 10 days in the yard, we went back in the water on March 25. Great to be back on the boat and in the water!

Next post will be about having a guest on board, getting to show some of the Society Islands and some of our adventure to a long-time friend of Peggy’s.