February 02, 2001 -- Work and Explorations

February 2, 2001 -- Work and Explorations This morning, we had several things on our to do list. Anytime you are off shore, there always seems to be things to add to the to do list. While I worked on putting a coat of sealer on the hatch screen, Mike worked on our tach problem that had re-occured. I laid out my drop cloth and after cleaning up the new wood, applied a coat of sealer. It took some time, mostly because it was intricate work. Mike had the much more difficult time. He had to crawl outboard of the port engine to investigate the alternators on our port engine. He couldn't see anything wrong with them, so he crawled out and went up to the bridge where he again dropped the gauge panel to do further investigation. The only change he made was to remove the old step-down converter that was bad, and add a second ground wire to the gauge ground point. However, that seemed to fix the problem when we test fired the engines. Next we moved outside to address the sail related problems. Originally, I hoisted Mike up the Jib to tighten the shackles that hold the jib sheets on. As it turns out, one of them was suffering some metal fatigue! I lowered him back down and we went in search of a new shackle. Which means we had to remember where we had the spares, a feat into it's self. After locating one, we were able to pull the jib out since there was very little wind and replace the shackle from the deck before furling the jib back. Next, we turned our attention to tightening the luff on the stay sail. We pulled out the stay sail, and tightened the pull string so that, hopefully, our sail will not luff when we use it. Once that was over, we decided to head for the island to check out the ruins. They were pretty cool. The majority of the buildings still had walls, though the roofs had caved in. We wandered around there for some time before heading back to the boat. Finally, we rounded out the day by finding a home for our stow away cat!