All of a sudden the geese have disappeared. No fanfare. Just suddenly not around. It makes us eager to get going too, but south, so we won't be seeing them again.
Working out on deck we often see the eagles now, circling and swooping down for a fish. This really has been a special place to be stuck!
Sandy spends hours out there working on the teak. Sometimes I don't know how she keeps going in the cold, but she does. Is there something addictive in old varnish and teak sawdust? She's perfected the use of the heat gun which helps cope with the cold and it works well with areas where the old varnish is thick. The doghouse and pilot house are done, apart from a few window surrounds she's still working on, and they look terrific.
We've had Bill up here for a couple of days. He's a long time member of the Cruisers Forum too, as well as being a wizkid (kid could be misleading) with electrical stuff, solar panels, batteries etc.
After careful consideration we decided to replace the entire battery bank... all 12 batteries. They would probably have needed replacing before we get to Australia and trying to find decent batteries among the coconuts in the Pacific would be challenging, and expensive.
On the day that we changed the battery bank out, we took the opportunity to repair the port side water tank that lives under the battery bank and is normally inaccessable. It took Tom and I the whole day, and by the time the old batteries had been lifted out, up the companionway, over the cockpit side to the deck, down onto the dock, then up to the car park, and the same for the new ones, we'd moved a ton of batteries. And it felt like it! And the tank is repaired.
Bill came back to do the final hookup of the solar panels and mppt controllers. We'd been getting some strange readings so he brought Phil along. Phil is a retired US Navy engineer and was responsible for keeping the 6th Fleet operational.
It's a long stretch from keeping nuclear submarines going to sorting out Wind Wanderer's quirkiness, but they managed.
I haven't run the generator for 3 days in spite of overcast skies, so it looks like we have a good setup in place.
While they were here they managed to get the Pactor modem working so we will be able to use our ssb radio to get weather charts and send and receive emails anywhere in the world any time.
In the mean time we've got the EPIRB (emergency position inticating radio beacon) de-registered from S. Africa, reprogrammed for Australia, and registered with the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. We also managed to get Wind Wanderer her own call sign... VJN4195.
The shower floor rebuild is almost complete, the replacement of the wet exhaust system is in progress, the tank gauges are partially installed and half the tank repairs are done, the lines from the rollerfurling main and mizzen back to the cockpit will be finished next week and I can then put the headliner back, the name board is about ready to get it's letters in place and back on the transom, the heads'l is down so we can repair the chafed section of the halyard and get it back up, the new main and mizzen sails are here and waiting to be installed when the furling lines are done, we have half our bulk stores bought... but maybe I shouldn't include the whole 6 pages here!
We look like being ready to head for the Caribbean in 2 weeks. They will be 2 jam-packed weeks but at last it's looking realistic. The pages of work are actually reducing at last. Not that we ever expect to screw up and throw out the last one. But the major stuff will be behind us and Wind Wanderer will be sailing.
Until next time...