Monday, 5 Feb: The excitement of waking up to a fully uploaded video was very short lived: only 8% in 8h. Sorry folks, you are going to have to wait a while longer for this premiere to be released!
Lots of heavy showers around this morning. We have to run and shut the hatches multiple times, but we are treated to an amazing rainbow as we sit in the cockpit having breakfast.
Glen has been having troubles with the 2nd battery charger, a Mastervolt MASS 24v/75a. In the last week, it has ceased to kick-in automatically when the generator is started. It gets stuck in FLOAT mode and needs to be manually switched off then on again – that simple trick that often works with most naughty electronics! But to do that Glen has to enter the DC cupboard that is not too accessible.
Anyhow, this morning even that trick did not fix things. After the reset the charger still refuses to send any amps, even though it’s visibly active on the EasyView-5 monitoring panel. Without this 75amp charger we are down to only 100amps charging from the main COMBI unit. This is a still acceptable, but takes almost double generator time to fully recharge the Li-ion batteries.
The troubleshooting section of the user manual points to blown fuse. So in Glen’s usual spirt there is no dwelling on it, and after about an hour of cursing as he is contorted inside the cupboard, the unit is in bits. But he still cannot find any fuse.
At mid-day, we decide it’s time to do some proper admin, and we go ashore to the Grenada yacht club, where we spotted a launderette few days ago. Laundry is done while we sip beer and attempt another uploading on YouTube, but it takes a lot longer than anticipated: 4 hours!
In that time Glen manages to find a Mastervolt specialist to look at the charger. He comes on board and even without touching anything the damned charger works perfectly. Aaaagh! Why is it the electronics and computers always self-fix themselves where a technician is about to touch them! I guess they somehow fear expert hands on them. So after a rather expensive call-out bill of US$50 we take him back ashore.
After a very late lunch, there’s still lots of showers around so we stay put on the boat and edit the Barbados video clips into a 10 min compilation. Now that we are getting used to the Adobe software, the process is becoming enjoyable. But it still takes about 1 hour for every 2 minutes of finished editing.
As we go to bed we vouch to finally have a proper walk in town tomorrow, then move our headquarters to the south coast.