2015-02-10

Arnd

2015 Trip 2015-02-10

I woke up early and went to the boat for one last thorough search for my missing plug – with no luck. In the late morning I was picked up by ITGO and got my rental car. I went through the various Road Town chandleries and none carried my specific plug. I checked out the NAPA auto parts store for a 24V portable charger, but the only one I could find cost $1300, somewhat more than I was willing to pay. I returned to the boat and tried to figure out a way to solve my power problem. “Zanshin” has two power plugs, one of them is a big 50A 250V while the other is the smaller 32A 250V one. The big power is no problem, I have that cable and connector, but that powers only the air conditioning system and isn’t connected to the rest of the electrical system In the end I managed to do a quick-and-dirty cross connection. The hot-water heater also runs off the 50A circuit, and it has a normal shuko plug. So I took a spare power cord, cut off the end and attached the 3 wires (phase, neutral and ground) to the secondary input of my Victron inverter/charger. I set the charger to only supply 25A so that I didn’t burn out my temporary wiring job and when I flipped the switch it worked like a dream and the batteries started charging at anywhere from 25A to 40A (depending upon what the solar panels were supplying) and I had hopes that my bank could soon be fully charged and would hopefully not have taken too much damage from the severe discharge.

I took a quick trip downtown to get water and other beverages to put into the fridge, since with power attached I could now turn that on rather big power drain. I will have to wait until I get put into the water before turning on the freezer, since that is keel-cooled and relies on the plate being submerged in order to dissipate heat.

One of the local yard guys, called “Africa” once again offered to put on some bottom paint and I let myself be convinced to take his offer, so he was busily at work while I lugged my heavy water, soda and beer onto the boat. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, since the boat is still on the hard it takes a 15 foot ladder to get to the bottom of the transom.

Original hosting provider breaks my old website

My old hosting company, who will remain unnamed although their name starts with “go” and the end rhymes with “baddy”, changed their software with little notice and the original SV-ZANSHIN.COM site stopped working overnight.

Every. Single. Page.

So I’ve transitioned to another provider. These original pages have been migrated, but all the formatting and other features are gone and the will still contain numerous display issues and formatting anomalies.

The manual effort of conversion is too much and not worth the effort involved. Over 1000 blog diary pages like this one are going to remain in this condition. The pictures are full-scale, but won’t expand when clicked. But you can can copy them to view them in their original splendour.