We are en route back to Fort Pierce, bringing this little excursion to an end. We expect to arrive midday Sunday. We are currently anchored just off the ICW a few miles north of Jupiter Inlet. We thoroughly enjoyed our time on the Atlantic side of Biscayne Bay, Elliott Key and Key Largo. I will share more about that in a future post, but at the moment I need to vent.
I’m tired of our systems malfunctioning! Yes, it’s happening again. At least when a diesel engine dies, Dave can fix it, even if he has to wait for parts. He can do some troubleshooting of our solar electric systems, but most of our issues are design or programming issues that require repair or reprogramming by the company that made the part. In February we installed two each of “upgraded” battery, solar and generator controllers. These upgrades were meant to ensure we didn’t have another catastrophic double system failure like the one last November that left us disabled 80nm offshore of Georgia. We returned to Florida this summer in the midst of a pandemic not only as a getaway from direct contact with humans, but also because we needed to install our replacement LiFePO4 batteries (from Sweden) and our repaired throttle (from Finland). We finally left Fort Pierce on August 3rd hopeful that our systems would finally be reliable, and they were…until 3 days ago.
We were back in the ICW, two days into the trek back to Fort Pierce. First, our newly repaired throttle started intermittently cutting out on the port side. If you don’t speak boat, no throttle means no motor. This had been happening on the starboard side in March, which is what prompted our sending it to Finland for repair. They were supposed to have also replaced the port part of the mechanism, and we did get charged for that, but apparently something went wrong. That in itself is annoying, but not stressful because we still had a reliable starboard system…until today. For some reason we do not yet completely understand, the starboard generator over-amped the batteries, resulting in the battery control box shutting down the batteries followed by the generator shutting down and losing communication with the system as well. Dave replaced one of the battery box fuses, and it immediately burned out again. He couldn’t get the batteries to come back on nor get the generator to wake up. This of course happened just as we were passing the Lake Worth Inlet, which is past the last decent anchorage for the next 3 miles! We found a tight place near a marina to drop the hook while Dave tried to trouble shoot further, which included a call to one of guys who has been helping us with our systems all along. Oh, and note the date- it’s Friday. So the European companies we need to talk were already closed for the weekend by the time this all happened, so they won’t even get Dave’s emails until Monday morning.
After a quick lunch, Dave turned on the cross ship cable so that we could run both motors off the port generator and battery bank and our complete solar array. We’ve done this before and it works well. Thank goodness Dave decided we should have two redundant systems, which allows us to crosswire them this way, otherwise we would have been stranded, again. While underway with this cross ship setup, about 2 hours after shutting itself down, the starboard generator’s communication display suddenly woke up of its own accord. We left well enough alone and Dave will test it tomorrow when we get underway. We still had to contend with the glitchy port throttle, and it did need coaxing to restart several times, but we finally got to tonight’s anchorage and we should make it to Fort Pierce (fingers crossed). Today was our longest jump, 26nm. The next two days are 17nm and 15nm. I’ll breathe easier when we’re tied up to the dock in our slip!
Life on Lady 