Sunrise
I awoke refreshed, since the night had been calm. After making my coffee and eating a McVities cookie for breakfast, I started out with my morning tasks. I wanted to get a lot completed before going ashore to pick up my items at the airport.
The first action was replacing some of my LED lights with items I’d bought on Amazon. The old ones are still working, but now several of the LEDs are fading or not working. I started with one at the workstation and it fit perfectly. I turned on the light and I was surprised at how bright it was. After about 10 seconds I saw smoke coming from the LED and turned it off. I am fairly certain that there’s no limiting resistor or circuit in the light, even though the listing on Amazon stated so. That’s a problem with diodes, they need to have the current limited or else they will overheat. <Sigh> I waited 2 weeks for these, but at least they were cheap.
Then I opted to replace the light switch in the forward head with one of the 20 new ones I’d also bought on Amazon and waited 2 weeks for. Access to the switch was very difficult and I worked up a sweat getting to it, including breaking some wood. When I reached the old switch and tested the replacement, the light went on but didn’t stay on. I’d ordered a momentary toggle on switch by mistake. Both the momentary and normal switches were next to each other on the Amazon page and I must have selected the wrong one. Another magnificent fail.
Finally, I sat down at my computer and updated yesterday’s blog. I looked at my solar panel output, expecting the sunshine to be charging my batteries. The input wasn’t as high as it should have been I went topsides and, much to my consternation, saw that one of my new solar panels was missing and couldn’t be found on board! I’ll go dive later, but I don’t think it will survive the swim even if I do find it. That was a $250 failure, plus 3 weeks of waiting! And the replacement panel is no longer in stock.
It is only 10:15. What else can go wrong today?
Next project
I bought an inexpensive $50 touch screen on Amazon that should be compatible to my Cerbo GX. The Victron screen is sold for $300, so this is a worthwhile alternative. At the same time, I wanted to move the Cerbo controller to a more permanent location that wasn’t right close to the MPPT controllers. This took only 1 1/2 hours and, surprisingly, met with some success.
Lunch
I drank a litre of water to replenish lost fluids and I’m now trying to decide whether to eat something small now and have a small dinner or eat nothing and have a bigger dinner. I think I’ll do the latter.
Fortified with water, I began work on the forward head. The switch will have to wait until I get replacements. I also put the ceiling cover on again, as I will have to wait until I get a new solar panel before drilling a hole through the deck. The previous sentences took but a minute to write. The underlying tasks took over an hour. Getting the panel lined up with the holes proved to be a finicky business.
Afternoon
I opened up my oil storage area so that I could get a small canister to replenish the main engine oil. This was a mistake. I’d not noticed that one oil container (1 litre) and one cooling fluid container (4 litres/1 gallon) had chafed and spilled into the watertight section. So, I had to get out the suction pump and drain/clean them.
Then I went topsides to replace a screw on the bimini which had shaken loose and dropped overboard. My provisional fix involved zip ties and paracord, not an optimal solution. It took an hour to get this single screw in. The stainless fitting had bent a bit, preventing the screw from fitting. I used adjustable vice grips to slowly bend the thick steel sufficiently to allow the screw to be used. Clamp, release, turn the adjustor less than 1/4 turn, repeat.
Ashore
I was happy to get my feet on terra-firma and chatted with fellow sailors at the SDB before getting a tasty Kebap/Gyros and returning to Zanshin. Back on board I was going to read in the cockpit for a bit and just closed my eyes to rest them for a second. I awoke two hours later with a kink in my neck that I hoped would disappear before tomorrow and went to my real bed.