Weather bound at anchor

Wednesday 2 January, Salt Plage, St.Kitts: The crew and dinghy have another lazy day.
After strong wind throughout the night, we wake up to yet more howling gusts and rain squalls. The sun is clearly away on holiday today, so we declare our laziness should continue, under the guise of being weather-bound.

Following our inquiries, we received an email reply from Reckmann in Germany regarding our vang issue. They have some pointers for us but they don’t really know what is happening any more than we do. Their strong advise is: rather than keep on spending yet more money on servicing, just buy a new vang from them. Well, that would solve their problem wouldn’t it? No more nagging from me! Knowing these kind of parts, there probably won’t be much change left out of a $5,000 note! But we ask for pricing away, just to amuse ourselves.

While on this theme, in between squalls, Glen goes out to inspect again the tiny blemish he found on the piston rod. And while at it, he noticed that the damned thing is dripping oil even with no pressure applied. So clearly the seals are already damaged, again. Next time we have it serviced in St. Maarten, Glen vows to watch them do it … like a hawk. If it wasn’t for the high pressure nitrogen gas at the other end of the piston, Glen would likely take it apart himself.

Meanwhile, the Salt Plage bar continues with their business despite the weather, and we note a RIB to beat all RIBs is taking passengers there from a nearby super yacht. This RIB (ridged inflatable boat … like our dinghy) must be 40ft long with twin inboard engines. It has a bow thruster, a cabin on the front, radar and 2 satellite domes on the sunshade and 4 huge white chairs on its teak aft deck – presumably to carry their over fed clientele! Maybe we should get ourselves one of those. We’d have to upgrade the davits, but what the heck, we’d certainly standout coming into a marina right?

On the vlog front, our Antigua video thankfully uploaded at full resolution throughout the night. Phew. This boosts me starting the next one, so I slave all day over the PC compiling the Montserrat video clips.

As dusk falls Glen is sanding off the last bits of Ceolan varnish from the gunwales. There were some spots left around the port aft corner.
Then he comes in to run the generator. With the inverter switched on 24/7 to keep the PC running for the video uploading, our batteries are running low quicker than normal. And no sun today didn’t help the situation. While charging the batteries and heating water we notice the generator is running at 83% load. That’s odd because the system previously tuned down the load automatically to ensure the generator only ran at 75% load at a maximum. We’ll have to watch this going forward, because something is not right.

After reviewing the Montserrat video a few times and fine tuning, it is again way passed midnight before our berth gets to see us.