After a good night’s rest I headed ashore early and walked to “:The Woodstock” in order to ask them to cut the radio/instrument panel according to the markings that I’d put on and also scrape away some wood glue remains on a piece attached to the panel. They agreed to do the work (for an hour’s labour) and asked that I return in the afternoon to pick up the results. I walked around the docks for a bit before heading back to the boat and then returning ashore with my notebook in the backpack in order to catch up on the internet using the free WiFi services offered by The Mad Mongoose.
Somehow the day went by and at 15:00 I returned to find that they’d done a very professional job on the panel and I returned to Zanshin in order to complete at least this one job. With some trepidation I inserted the various components and (somewhat to my surprise), they all fit perfectly! I had to remove the wiring for the Xantrex monitor and despite writing down the colors and slots I managed to transpose two wires (to my defense, the wiring colors were black, red, white, green, red, black – and when inserted backwards it seems OK but transposes the two centre wires) which then showed my main bank as 12V and auxiliary bank as 24V which wasn’t what I wanted.
The downside to having disconnected the battery monitor is that it required a full synchronization in order to work correctly, and I usually run the generator about an hour to get to over 90% charge that isn’t sufficient and I would need to run the generator a good 3 hours or perhaps a bit more in order to get to 100% full charge on the bank and achieve synchronization. I proceeded to run the generator and did laundry, heated water, charged whatever electronic devices I could think and basically used as much power as possible so that the poor generator wouldn’t be running under almost no load for hours on end; the only task I didn’t want to do was run the watermaker, as the waters in Falmouth Harbour are not particularly cleanly with many mega yachts and big yacht constantly running their generators. Fuel in the intake water can permanently damage the watermaker membrane.
Because I had to run the generator and had started rather late, I missed the happy hour at the Mad Mongoose and decided to remain aboard and make some corn-on-the-cob and BBQ’d hot-dogs with the remaining hot-dog buns. The dinner was tasty (I was hungry by this time) and with the cockpit LED light brightly lit I read a bit more in my book. After dinner I watched an episode of “The Thin Blue Line” on with Rowan Atkinson on the notebook and then returned to the cockpit, this time with LEDs turned off, and gazed at the stars in the cloudless and almost moonless night.
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