The winds had picked up during the night and despite being securely anchored and in a location where the current keeps the boat aligned with the prevailing winds I didn’t sleep all that well. It will take another one or two nights of the boat rolling and yawing around before I get back into deep sleep mode. The winds are supposed to pick up even more, up to 30 knots, tonight and I am not sure if I am going to stay in this place or tuck in behind Prickly Pear to get a bit more shelter from the wind and small fetch in the North Sound.
I got my dive gear all set up and took the plunge with a full tank, fully expecting to spend a long time searching for the boarding ladder. My experience diving and searching for Michael Beans’ sunken dinghy in the nearby mooring field (see Searching for Michael’s sunken dinghy) had me expect to do an exploratory dive and then take some line down in order to do some expanding circle searches. But fortunately within a couple of minutes and only two search lines parallel to the boat’s swinging arc I had the ladder (despite very low visibility) soon surfaced with my prize.
I got the dinghy engine mounted (loosely, since the two set-screws are galled in place and Lincoln at Nanny Cay hadn’t found time to fix it) and motored slowly around for a bit before returning to the boat and attacking the task of getting the bimini LEDs installed. The wires had corroded a bit and one had broken off, so I got out the soldering iron and fired her up. After a while I tested to see if the tip was hot enough to melt solder and it wasn’t, then I tried it on the wetted sponge. Still nothing. Finally a quick try on my fingers to determine that it wasn’t heating at all. This is a unit with a temperature control, so I opened up the unit and got my multimeter out to see if perhaps one of the components or the pot (potentiometer) was broken. All was in order, so I determined it was the iron itself and took that apart. Unfortunately the heating coil consists of a small diameter wire wound around a coil and it seems that this wire was broken somewhere, rendering the soldering iron useless and I trashed the whole unit. I put up the one LED rail but am going to have to replace all the LEDs since they have gotten very, very yellow. It seems that the plastic waterproof enclosure that I used wasn’t as UV resistant as the manufacturer had led me to believe.
Tonight is another steak night, since I have to eat it before it gets bad& the hamburger beef just went over the side to feed the fishes as it had developed a rather unhealthy grey and green hue.
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