N26° 32.939', W77° 03.253'
Tonight finds us safely at anchor in Marsh Harbour.
We actually arrived in Marsh Harbour yesterday, making the decision to leave Treasure Cay a day early in order to get our alternator issues addressed. There were going to be a lot more options for us here, so we said goodbye to the incredible beach at Treasure Cay and headed out.
We spent the night last night at Marsh Harbour marina, taking advantage of the metered power to get our house bank back up to 100%. We explained our problem to the dockmaster there and he suggested a local boat tech named Andrew, who is especially good with electrical issues.
This morning Andrew came to our boat to take a look at our problem, and after doing some tests came to the same conclusion that I had, that our alternator probably had a bad regulator. He popped it out and upon opening it up discovered that we also had a burned out stator winding. This pretty much sealed the fate of the alternator. We decided to bag it up and perhaps we'll see if an alternator shop in the US can sort it for us. More likely I'm going to upgrade to a higher quality marine alternator and a new charger to take advantage of it, but that will probably have to wait until our return home this spring.
When we pulled out the bad alternator we discovered that the person that had installed it for the previous owner hadn't simply spliced in the unique connector, but had actually constructed a patch cable to convert to the new connector. Removing the patch cable left us with the original alternator's connector, making installing the old alternator much easier.
I let Andrew handle the alternator swap, mainly because I wasn't sure if the old alternator was serviceable or not, and I wanted him to test it after installation. Fortunately it worked like a charm, so we're back in business. The old alternator is rated at 94 amps, while the one that failed was rated at 140 amps, so we're at least close in the output capacity. This should mean that recharging while we're running will only be a little slower than what we were getting with the failed alternator.
After our alternator issues were solved we decided to leave the marina and head out into the harbour to anchor for a few days. We will be dinghying back tomorrow evening though, as the Jib Room restaurant has a famous rib dinner on Wednesday nights.
There are a lot of boats at anchor and tied to mooring balls here, but Marsh Harbour is quite large, with lots of room for many more boats than are currently here. It is a pretty busy harbour, with boats travelling all over the place, but so far we have been pretty lucky to not be waked too badly.
Our plan is to get some groceries tomorrow, wait out some rain forecasted to arrive on Thursday, and then on Friday we'll head out and hop over to Hopetown.
Here are a few pictures from the last couple days.
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| Another great travel day on the Sea of Abaco |
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| Approaching Marsh Harbour |
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| On the dock in Marsh Harbour marina |
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| Nice to see Ottawa at the top of something... :-) |
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| At anchor in Marsh Harbour |
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| Marsh Harbour sunset |
Good news that you had a spare. How's the hull bottom making out with the warm water? Still planning to pull her at some point for a cleanup?
ReplyDeleteIt's actually doing well. I dive under the boat every once in a while to check on it. All that's getting any real amount of growth is the waterline, so we've scrubbed that a few times.
DeleteAll in all it looks like it will be good enough for this year, and we'll give it a good new coat next year.