Techno at night
As I’d feared, the live electronic musical festival named “Welcome to the Jungle” had nothing to do with the Guns ‘n Roses song. It was loud, despite the fan going and my earplugs I still felt the beat until about 03:00. If the music had been any better, I would have just gone ashore and joined them – but few of the songs were to my taste and most of them I’d classify as audio torture.
Morning
I enjoyed my morning coffee and late fried eggs with hot-dog bun breakfast (I’ve run out of bread). Then I started working on the electrical system. First was to connect the battery temperature sensor to a battery post and to extend the wires by about a foot so that I could plug them in. The battery posts are bolts screwed into the battery, so when I remove one the stiffness of the battery cables makes it quite difficult to reinsert them. Plus, access isn’t great, so it took a while. I’d soldered extensions to the cable and ran it through the bilge, but after connecting them the system wouldn’t power up. It turns out that the fuse looked OK but was actually blown. Once I replaced it the system fired up right away and the battery temperature sensor was also detected.
I’ve got a Victron Skylla charger and found out that it can also be connected to the integrated network using the built-in CAN-bus and a simple RJ45 ethernet cable. I found a couple of short cables, but the only one long enough was about 60 feet long, so I added an appropriately sized cable to my daily shopping list.
Ashore
My first stop was at Lagoonies to see about shipping packages purchased from Amazon at Business Point, and from there to Electec for the Cat-V cable. After that, I purchased another 60L of diesel for the boat. The fuel dock isn’t deep enough for Zanshin, so I have to fill up my tanks in 60l batches. If I were to fill up both tanks that would be 12 trips in total, but I’ll just fill one tank and do the rest once I reach a fuel dock.
Filling up using the canisters can be messy, but I’m getting better at transferring from jerrycan to tank with only a drop of two of diesel spillage. The only issue is with time – these modern spouts don’t allow fast filling.
Afternoon
Electrical work consumed much of my time, starting with pulling my new cable from the navigation station forward to the controller panel. As can be expected, it wasn’t easy or quick. Luckily, I didn’t break anything, and new cable was perfectly sized for the job. The picture to the left shows the access, I had to crawl into the space at the top left in order to push the cable around a corner.
Once that was done, I had to extricate myself from this position and fish around on the other side to see if I could reach it. Fortunately, once I’d reached it, I could pull it through and connect it to the CAN-Bus connection on the Cerbo GX controller.
I’ve set up the Victron system so that it communicates to my online Victron account, and when the Starlink is up and running it sends measurement data every couple of minutes. The access to view the system setup and statistics can be found here.
Later
After finishing work aboard, it was already 18:00 and I’d missed the beginning of Happy Hour ashore, but I quickly showered and went ashore in order to at least catch the tail end. It was very busy, but the server Cassandra saw me, and I soon had a frosty Carib beer with a lime in my hand.
After the sun set, I saw what looked like a full moon in the sky, but I checked before posting and the moon won’t be full until the 25th. But it looked nice in any case.
I opted to return to Zanshin and make a light meal aboard rather than brave the restaurant scene on the main strip on a busy Saturday night.
I wasn’t particularly hungry, so I just made a small sandwich using the last hot-dog bun instead of bread.