Thursday 5 Dec, Charleston SC to St. Augustine FL, day 1: From Charlston to level with Brunswick.
7am alarm to allow us to dock ready for fuel at City Marina when it opens at 8am. First attempt, we dock where directed to “the larger 1-inch fuel nozzle”. Only to find 1” is actually 1 1/4” and doesn’t fit in our fuel tank inlet. Numpties, what’s the point of telling us the I.D. of the fuel nozzle? It’s the OD that will or won’t fit in the hole!
So we then have to wait for a smaller yacht to leave before we can get nearer the smaller fuel hose. Fueling up is straight forward as usual. 165gallons for $550. That’s due to a lot of heating and motoring in the last 2 months. Normally that quantity of diesel would last us 5 months or more.
While safely docked, I go about uploading the new Empirbus configuration file, modified by Hallberg Rassy. Upload goes well, the system reboots and all power is restored. Hmmm, some things do work as they should do!
While feeling bold, I call our Spanish Mastervolt guru, Ivan Jorda at Azimuth, and he uses TeamViewer to access the Mastervolt bus to look at our shore power issue. All seems ok and once I connect to shore power everything is fine & dandy. So it must have been the Beaufort dock power that was the problem after all. Nice that the system automatically protected itself – just wish it could have told me that rather than looking like a system failure. I may be pretty handy, but IT guru I am not!
30 mins after docking we are off, with all the to-do boxes ticked. Let’s hope today will continue to be a day of remedies outnumbering failures!
It’s another bright sunny day but chilly air. The wind is good right now so we exit Charleston harbour under sail, only for the wind to drop to nothing once at sea 🙁 But Oana is happy, she prefers motoring to sailing. Actually she’s not a happy Bunny this morning. She has another frightful headache. She’s had several recently and all apparently linked to getting sun on her head. Not a good thing as we head to a yet sunnier climate. Nurofen are champions again, but she can’t keep popping those like candy, it’s not good.
We motor all day SSW on the rumb line to St. Augustine, along with several other yachts on a similar routing. Once the murky coastal water turns to that wonderful clear blue, we decide it’s time to flush the pickled watermaker and make some nice clean RO water (for long term storage the system is filled with a “pickling” fluid to protect the delicate reverse osmosis elements). When the engine is on, we can power the watermaker’s 220vAC system from the Mastervolt 150amp alternator via the inverter. Once the pickling fluid is flushed we switch the flow into the tank. Seems a long time since we made water, 7 months now. Once stabilized, all the parameters from the watermaker seem in line with normal except the rate of flow. Previously we were getting 150-160 liters per hour. Right now it’s only 115. We wonder why. Maybe it’s the water temperature. We’ll see how it progresses.
Late afternoon we are cheered up by the sight of 2 dolphins on our bow. Big Bottle Nosed. And very soon they are joined by several more, all ducking and diving around the bow and occasionally breaking off and jumping clear out the water. Such a lovely sight, such an amazing wild animal. We are mesmerized by them for 20 minutes. Then they suddenly break off and are gone. Beautiful.
Talking sea creatures, the fishing line is deployed, but no takers today. And we wonder how dolphin are never caught with fishing lures. They are just plain smart we guess.
Sunset produces yet another amazing crimson glow in the sky. It sets 30 mins later than it did in Maryland, which is so nice. A quick calculation on degrees longitude and that seems about the right time difference.
After dinner of delicious scallops (freshly caught yesterday, from Harris Teeter!) We get into our watch routine. At midnight we are still motoring and the fuel gauge already off the full mark 🙁