16º 30.430s 145º 27.414w
Wed Jul 10 2019
The
weather has gone light for the next several days, and darned if the wind isn’t
even out of the North with either a West or East component, depending upon how
you hold your head. With no hope of continuing to hone our kiting skills we’ve
elected to motor on down here to the South pass, about an hour journey, and an
opportunity to top up the batteries a bit and make some water. The past few
days haven’t yielded a lot of sunlight, so the solar array hasn’t been at its
best. It’s amazing to see how poor the output is in heavy clouds and rain; 5% -
10% of rated output hasn’t been uncommon during these cloudy rainy days.
Anybody who thinks we have too much solar (1440 watts) is just uninformed, as
we’ll likely never see anywhere near that amount and in these cloudy conditions
generally a whole lot less.
Nevertheless,
for the most part the solar keeps the batteries up and we’ve got enough reserve
battery capacity that we can weather several crappy solar days before we feel
the urge to burn fossil fuel, and usually by then Mr. Sun makes an appearance,
or we decide to go somewhere anyway and have to motor a bit.
The
South pass offers a variety of attractions. There’s the “wall of sharks” and
the upcoming grouper spawning event we’re expecting this weekend should be
pretty nuts. There are a couple of small dive resorts here, so there’s a bar /
restaurant and generally they have pretty good bandwidth available over WIFI.
It’s about 5 bucks for 300 megabytes and once the magic code is entered it’s
good for 12 hours. As we’ve got a wifi booster/repeater at the top of our mast
we don’t even need to go to the bar with our devices; we can just kick back on
the boat. Naturally we got here and the lack of sunshine means the giant
battery array that powers the communications system is all pooped out, so NO
INTERNET TODAY!
Nuts.
We’ve
been showing a voice and 2G data signal on our cell phones over at Hirifa, but
it doesn’t actually work there. As we got pretty close to the South pass where
the cell tower is, suddenly our phones started dinging away with Facebook
updates and other useless alerts. It’s still not enough to download emails with
attachments or upload a picture, but at least we can see whether we’ve got some
email of import. As usual it’s most all junk.
Anchoring
here is a bit of a palaver, as there are bommies everywhere and the patches of
sand one can drop an anchor on are often 3 – 4 meters diameter or less. Lucky
for us our pals Simon and John from Halcyon were happy to don their snorkel
gear and paddle about until they found the perfect spot for us to drop. With Isabel
on the bow relaying and me at the helm making JollyDogs dance about, we finally
got the hook in the sandbox, then Simon dove down and moved our anchor until it
was optimally placed. We backed down as Simon and John observed and then placed
our floats to keep most of the chain from contacting the bommies, then pulled
hard one more time to simulate a pretty strong blow.
We’re
here!
Off
to check out the wreck that is now firmly up on high ground since the keel got
ripped loose and it floated higher in the big waves we’ve had the last few
days. It’s perched with the stern to shore and the mast completely vertical,
and it’s been virtually stripped of anything useful or valuable save the mast,
furler and standing rigging, and the fancy bits at the top of the mast. John
and Simon hatched a plan to go after those things tomorrow, and I’ve got my eye
on a few Wichard folding padeyes that I think I can put to good use. Boys day
out – off to the “pick a part” junkyard tomorrow!
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