So, we’ve survived our second night at sea! And actually, that would be our second day and a half at sea. Frankly, the nights at sea are easier to endure than the days. Daylight, means sunlight, which means full UV exposure. We’ve both got rather painful sunburns already!
Although I like to complain, I really don’t have much to complain about. You see, so far this trip has been disturbingly uneventful. As Elena points out in her blog, as of yet, we have not been visited by any disaster fairies. The way I put it, we’ve been dodging bullets, left right and center! Take yesterday evening, for instance. The sun was mercifully setting, the evening was lovely, the seas were calm and the breeze was gentle. We were celebrating the end of the daily furnace with crudites in the cockpit. And then, the bloody navigation lights short out and die. Sure, just about everything is broken on this boat, but the nav lights?! Shit, we might not be able to see anybody else but at least when we have lights they might see us and avoid running us over. Ah, who am I kidding? I guess it depends on how big their boat is and how much they worry about scratching it.
Being rather prudent or, anal retentive, I decided that navigation lights were a must. So, began the usually endless and fruitless and horrible task of trying to track down just where the short circuit occurred. As it is, I started from the pointy end of the boat, that would be the bow to you nautical types, and the first thing I noticed was an extremely hot connection, burn marks, and molten insulation. Yay! I had found the fault. Elena held the tools like an operating room nurse, while I performed quick and dirty electrical resection. it worked! We now have pretty lights that may at least entertain other mariners. Let’s just say that was an easy bullet to dodge.
And so it goes, in the last couple of days the autopilot has failed several times, each time has been a reasonably easy fix. One of our house inverters, that’s a thing that takes 12 volts and turns it into 120 volts for things like the starlink and computers and anything not boaty has become intermittent, but jiggling the supply wires has brought it back to life! Software we use for navigation on our phones and Android tablets has updated and now doesn’t work very well but restarting several times gets us at least a position fix. The marina we stopped at to buy diesel fuel and water, was open, and actually had diesel fuel and water to sell us. The credit card machine was working, which is unusual for remote islands in Bahamas.
Currently, the weather predicting ai’s and climate models, which are eerily accurate, are predicting some nasty weather coming in directly ahead in our path. We’ve decided to go to a tiny desserted cay in the Bahamas to wait it out, and hopefully fix some of these other bullets that we didn’t manage to dodge. Like for instance, the ceiling in the forward cabin has fallen. We haven’t managed to close the anchor locker with the destroyed anchoring system. And the auto pilot is making the kind of noises one might associate with Jurassic park. Definitely not the kind of noises an autopilot should be making.
And don’t forget to check out our current position which I believe Elena has created a link for. We are still connected to the internet, thanks to Elon Musk (the man, not the new man-scent) and SpaceX’s thousands of tiny little satellites keeping us in touch with humanity.
Ok, that’s it for me today, the idiot autopilot sounds like a baby tyrannosaurus, either have to go deal with this thing or maybe I should feed it.