This was a great Memorial Day week, in no small part due to Nancy taking a full week off and resisting the temptation to sneak peeks at email on her iPhone. The week was also made great by the fact that we spent it on Makara and realized a number of things that had literally been in the planning for years. Most important Makara is now ready to sail for the season. We had hoped to get out at least one day over the week, but alas the weather gods were not cooperative. I must confess that it was wonderful to be on board that many nights in a row despite working very long days.

The most visible signs of activity are on deck. Varuna (the name of our dinghy),after a year waiting on shore is now resting nicely on the mounts we installed over the last several visits. Once we finally cast off Varuna will be our "vehicle" when we arrive in port and we have spent great care to make sure she is strapped down good and solid (don't want that big southern ocean wave ripping her off the deck). We also tried out a three point lift that works very well. There is much more control as we lift the 100lb Varuna 10 feet off the water, and we can now swing the dinghy onto the mounts upright and then flip it over relatively easily.

Another visible sign we have been there is the jib is now back on the furler. What you can’t see is the servicing of the furler we did prior to raising the jib. I also spent a good deal of time adjusting the furling control line to eliminate friction. Much smoother furling now. I also finally installed the reefing lines in the sail. I had already added a new 3rd reef line as the original was way too short. I them moved the original 3rd reef to the 2nd reef position and the original 2nd reef line to the 1st reef position. I figured they should all be just fine then. Wrong. We masterfully raised the sail, checked the tack rings North had added to allow the tacks to make it to the tack hook and threaded the lines through the reef cringles on the leach. After fully raising the sail we set about tying them to the boom using a Halyard Bend. Well, at least we tied off the 3rd reef. As you might guess the 2nd and 1st reef lines were still too short. Rats, rats, rats and more rats! Not to be deterred we immediate measured and estimated what would be required and procured new line for the 2nd and 1st reed lines. These are now on the boom and the only remaining task is to install them on the sail next time we raise it. Hopefully this will be immediately before a nice day sail!

Nancy spent quite a bit of time working on the navigation electronics.  Her goal was to understand the system better and tidy it up a bit. First we installed a new PC monitor that runs on 12V instead of 110V. That was quite a job getting it in the correct position, drilling the new holes on mounting it. One by product is now the small inverter we added to power the old monitor has been removed making for a much cleaner setup. We then reconnected our updated ships PC, hooked it up to the Raymarine high speed hub and did something we had not yet done but had planned for some time. We were able to retrieve our Navionics charts (cartridge plugged into out E80 plotter) on the PC using the RayNav software! Really cool, and something we had waited for years to realize. What was even more impressive was to then display the radar on the PC as well. Quite a rush. One thing left is to rationalize out NMEA feeds in and out of the Raymarine system so we can provide position information to our radios for DSC emergency transmissions. While Nancy was working on the VHF connections she finally found what was causing our hailer problems. There were bad solder joints on the connector from when the boat was commissioned. She repaired these and darn near blew me off the deck with a hailer test. I can assure you that it now works very well.

Finally, if you take a look at our arch you would notice quite a bit more going on there now. We added two new antennas, the AIS GPS antenna and a dedicated AM/FM antenna, to the arch. To do that we had to perform surgery on two of our antenna posts and add some new adapters that let us put two antennas on one post (complements of KATO who did the arch). A bit of rearranging of antenna positions and there it is. Just a few more wires to hook up and we are good again. The only unit left to go on the arch is the Fleet Broadband (satellite) unit which will happen very shortly.

From my perspective, since I am in charge of our anchor gear, one high point of the week was when we went to mock up the riser for our main anchor stopper. The stopper can’t go directly on deck as it would be too low, so we are having are friends at KATO make a stainless steel riser to bring it to the correct height. Now in order to get the correct height we needed to drop anchor. It didn’t matter we were in the slip, it had to go out, so we had our first anchor drill. With an 88 pound Rochna we had no clue how it would launch as we had not had an opportunity to try this since we put it on board. I can report that it definitely left the building and actually fairly gracefully. No fiberglass was harmed in this test! Even more critical, again having not done this before, was getting it back on board using the windlass. We were both nervous as this is a big anchor. However, we need not have feared as it came up smooth and steady and locked back in place on deck with no problems at all. Bless Lighthouse Windlasses. With things going this well with our ground tackle I am going to have to get on the stick on add some amenities to our forward locker to finish it off.

Living on a boat is not without its excitement. After a nice meal of Nancy's home-made enchiladas and one (or two) very nice beers we set about washing the dishes prior to turning in for the night. Nancy happened to be drying while I was washing.  All was proceeding well until all of a sudden we heard a deafening pop. We had no idea what it was other than it definitely came from quite near my head. At first we thought is was a mechanical noise and set about trying to find out it origin. Then I smelled burnt something. Now we have been in this situation before and have been well trained on what to do.  Let’s say that the boat went dark so fast it was impressive.

Once we had the power off we quickly guessed that what ever happened was above the headliner panel in the galley. All we could figure was something arced up there, perhaps from the work we did when installing the dinghy mount. It was unlikely as Nancy does class A work on anything that carries current but you never know and it was the only lead we had. So, down came that panel. Fortunately what took a long time the first time we did it, went very quickly now that we had already done it. That by the way is a lesson to all you fellow cruisers out there. Know how to disassemble your boat, quickly in a situation like this.  One thing we did notice that the smell had somewhat disapated once we cut the power. This is a good sign. As we finally dropped the panel we expected to find a charred spot or melted wire. We were both elated and somewhat confused when we looked above the panel and saw absolutely nothing wrong. So exactly what did fry? You are going to love this one so here it is. Just before the “incident” Nancy kindly turned on the galley fan. It was shortly afterwards the bang occurred. Since nothing visible was wrong with the fan and it was still running we never gave it a thought until after we dropped the panel and saw nothing else wrong. While sniffing around for the source of the problem I got close to the fan (now off of course as we cut the breakers) and whoa did it reek. Aha, we found our culprit.

But what happened? It turns out, and not intuitively either, that a Hella fan has a particular wire for plus 12 V and one for the return. It is not a simple fan where it doesn’t matter which wire is hooked to what. If you ask why it is because it has some electronics inside as do most modern multi-speed fans . On checking, indeed the plus wire was on plus and the return on ground. On further investigation we noted the plus sticker on the supposed plus wire was not stuck tight to the wire. Our guess is that during the reinstall after our other work it had fallen off the plus wire and gotten put on the ground side wire by mistake. The Hella fans do not have blocking diodes to effectively keep it off if you mis-wire it. And, after even more inspection and some dissection of the now defunct fan we noticed the evil culprit that spoiled our nice evening. A polarized capacitor that had literally exploded inside the fan because of a reverse polarity. Needless to say we aired out the cabin some more, replaced the headliner, laughed at it a bit and tested the other fan we removed during the dinghy mount install. I can report it was wired correctly and is running smoothly with no exploding capacitors noted. The next day we set out to replace the deceased fan and replaced it with a nice Carfamo Bora fan. The power consumption on an equivalent speed is better than the Hella fan and it mounted quite nicely. Oh, and we decided to go with white rather than black as it looks better where it is in the salon. I suspect we will replace a few more Hella fans with Bora fans shortly.

It is worth pointing out that despite several days of cloudy weather, all our electrical usage including using the windlass, the electric main halyard winch, lights, onboard navigation electronics, ship’s PC, WIFI unit, frig and freezer was provided by our solar panels. We never pulled the system down more than 25% full charge and that was on the high usage day. Figuring that our current battery bank is half the storage capacity of our actual cruising bank we were impressed.

We found it exceptionally hard this time to finally leave Makara and come back to our shore home, so much so that before leaving we gave Makara’s interior a thorough cleaning. Fortunately we realized so many planned tasks and we enjoyed being on board so much that it took the sting out of waving good bye.