September 15-19, 2001 -- Regaining Life

After a week of watching the news, we knew that we still had work that had to be done. Life marches on, and you can neglect your responsibilities only so long, so we turned again to the DC electrical system on the boat. We started the day by running new 6 gauge wire to the DC freezer system to correct a voltage problem. Then we spent the rest of the day tracing out and removing old unused wire. On September 16, we spent a quiet day aboard the boat. We still weren't feeling overly social. We did some varnish work, and that was about it. On September 17, we ran to the market. We hadn't been in over a week, and we were out of milk, bread and a few other essentials. On September 18, we discovered that our autopilot is a 24 volt system. We went to power it on, and discovered that it wasn't working. The only wires we had removed recently were 24 volt wires. Well, we scrambled to review our documentation and discovered that, indeed our system could support either 12 or 24 volts. We traced out the wiring and sure enough, our autopilot was hooked up to 24 volts, no longer supplied of course. Well, we had one 3 gang panel left. We hooked it up quickly and reran our autopilot stuff, and voila we had a breaker for the autopilot inside, one of our main goals of redoing the electrical panels in the first place! On September 19, during the morning net, Donna on Windwitch made an announcement to suggest that the cruisers in Grenada do a fundraiser to send to New York. We volunteered to collect for Prickley Bay. We went into the marina to meet with Windwitch about this around 10:30 AM AST or so. A squall came through from the south and one of the lines supporting the aft canvas broke. Steve let us know that our canvas was blowing all about, and that several boats had called us about the canvas. We went back to the boat and took the canvas down, so that was not flapping about. Fortunately, the new zippers held. After that bit of excitement and with the squall well past, we went back to the marina to grab a bacon cheese burger and use the Internet to check on a couple of things. When we returned to the boat, a big swell was running directly out of the south, must have been kicked up by a couple of large squalls out there. The boat was rolling 15 dregrees each way with a big one pushing it up to 25 or 30. This did not last too long, but was very uncomfortable. We tried several times to set a stern anchor, but were unable to due to the size of the swell. It finally calmed down, just in time for me to cook dinner!