Office work and travel preparations. That’s my agenda for today. I need to put in two full “office” days and then have the extended weekend to travel north. I have friends anchored in St. Kitts and might skip Martinique and head straight to the Iles des Saintes (and do grocery shopping there) before continuing onward.
The Starlink system wasn’t happy belowdecks, and placing it far forward and close to the bow railings and furled genoa kept the transmission speeds very low. Moving the antenna several feet towards the stern evidently gave it sufficient clearance. Consequently, I’m back up to 200mbps download speeds. Upload is a lot slower, but sufficiently fast for video calls.
Noon
Despite have all 6 solar panels mounted (for 750Watts total) the Xantrex shows a typical drain of 2-5Amps. Considering that this is for the inverter with PC, monitor and Starlink ; plus the constant DC drain of fridge and freezer, this isn’t too bad.
In addition, it is cloudy today. I think that on a sunny day I should break even with the solar panels. My energy requirements have gone up, so I am thinking of either getting a D400 wind generator or increasing my solar panel area.
My neighbors change on an almost daily basis and soon I’ll be gone from this anchorage as well. I am close to finishing my work day in the office and getting items stowed belowdecks in preparation for sailing north over the weekend over the Christmas holiday.
Afternoon
The office work is finished, now I’m doing the travel preparations. I went for a cooling swim and looked at the bottom. It’s not a pretty picture and I found my fins and paint scraper and got to work. Since the mask leaks, I didn’t do much, but at least one side of the hull to arm’s length is now clean. There’s still lots of green stuff and some hard stuff to remove on that side. Then comes the other side – this will certainly slow me down on passage.
I just got back from a late lunch at Jambe de Bois and somehow cannot find the energy to work at physical tasks. I’ll take a break and read a book for a bit, then see if I can get motivated to work.
Sunset
No matter how bad a day is, the sunsets make up for it!