12/5/14
Beaufort SC
Posted by Bill

The last couple of days were a flurry of activity getting ready to leave Beaufort. Yesterday we had someone remove our old inverter/charger and install the new one we had delivered to the marina. If you remember from earlier posts, the inverter part of the unit stopped working. The inverter allows us to use normal 120 volt electrical devices from our boat house batteries. We don’t use it very much but we do use it to charge my laptop when we are not tied to a dock. The charging function worked so we could continue to charge batteries when connected to shore power, but we plan to anchor more in the next legs of our journey and Beaufort was a good place to get it changed out.

I was going to do it myself, but I don’t like messing with 120 volt systems. Great way to catch your boat on fire if you do something stupid. It turned out to be a good move. The electrician identified that the cables between the batteries and the inverter/charger were too small of a gauge of wire for the new unit and looking at the instructions, he was correct. I would have missed that one. So, once again, a project that you think will take and hour or two, turns into a major effort and takes all day. I helped the electrician and we replaced the wiring, drilling new holes for them to go, and taking the old unit out and putting the new one in. As is standard in boat projects, the area we had to work in was an access hatch about 2 feet square and under the navigation table, but it all got installed.

Then the Link 2000 unit didn’t work for the second battery bank. The Link monitors battery usage, voltage, and allows remote programming of the inverter/charger. With the intermittent alternator/regulator issue we are having, I really need to see the amp usage and charging of the batteries, so this is a big deal! In addition, when we were cleaning up the mess of installing the new inverter/charger, we noticed water accumulated in one of the storage lockers beneath the floor. I tasted it and it was not salt water…good news because that would mean we had a leak from outside the boat…but there was almost 3 gallons of water in the locker…not good. We cleaned it out and tried to find where it was coming from to no avail.

So after drinks and dinner (great mexican place) and sleep, I awoke this morning with a list of stuff to get done…high on the list was troubleshooting the Link. Checking the storage locker again first thing in the morning, we found more water….ugh!!! There are holes to adjacent lockers where wires and hoses pass through so I checked the next locker forward, mainly because the fresh water pump and distribution system is housed there. Sure enough…lots of water. We hadn’t checked that locker for ages. After some observation I found a leaking connection at the water pump, tightened it up, and set up a method for further observation to make sure we got it. The initial observation also showed that the drip rate at the leak could have generated the amount of water in the lockers over the time period that expired before last checking the locker. Lockers further aft in the boat that are connected by the hose runs also had water, so we cleaned all of that out and ran fans to dry it all out. Checking it out later…no more leak.

Then we went to lunch at the restaurant at the marina. It was very good! Next was tackling the Link. After some probing around in crammed spaces full of wires and equipment, I located a loose ribbon cable that was the culprit…fully functioning Link now!!! Fixing two things successfully in a day tells one to not touch anything else…lol!

All of this and some general cleaning and straightening, led up to happy hour at 7:00, and we didn’t get much else done on the list. We are ready to leave if the weather window looks good in the morning. If it doesn’t, we are paid up until the middle of next week, and this place is a really nice place to stay. I would like to finally get to Florida though. Decisions, decisions…..