January 10, 2021
The posting seems to be far less frequent now . . . it will likely continue to be less frequent as the winter progresses. With Jinhee aboard, I get to share the majority of the details in realtime.
After spending a couple of nights at Emerald Bay Marina about 10 nm north of Georgetown, we finally made it to Georgetown to anchor for at least a week.
Emerald Bay was pretty easy to get to. The entrance is a bit of a rush as it is very narrow and there were choppy seas, but with 14 feet of depth, it wasn’t too bad. Unfortunately the docks that they put us on were not so pleasant. The docks themselves were new, floating docks, but they were designed for 10 tonne boats. Ours is 40 tonnes and the cleats were not made for our boat. Through the first night we rocked and rolled with the surge coming in from the ocean and decided that it was untenable. Luckily Ericka, the dock master, offered us a spot on the J docks, which were down a narrow channel, but didn’t have power and water. This option worked really well for us and the boat was nice and stable, tied to significantly larger cleats and we slept well.
Megan has decided to stay for another week and so we did move down to Georgetown. The water was relatively flat, but the surf along the shore was significant. Entering the cut into Georgetown was easy enough, but my brain was alight with potential risks. None of those risks came to pass, but in some parts of the ‘shipping channel’ we were in less than 8 feet of water. That said, we did get to Sand Dollar Beach without incident and dropped an anchor and it is a wonderful spot.
Not having power and water connections means that we run the generator to keep everything charged up, make water, use the oven, heat water and more. Over the past few days the bilge pump has been going at the same time as the generator. Despite having looked at things a couple of times, I failed to see an enormous problem.
Yesterday, I took the heat/sound shield off of the generator and that enormous problem was looking me right in the eye. My raw water intake pump was dumping water all over the enclosure and of course that means it wasn’t cooling the generator. It seems enough water was making it into the cooling system because I never had an over temperature alarm from the generator, but clearly there was a problem and it was probably getting worse by the hour.
(For reference we run the generator about two hours a day when at anchor for short periods. We will increase that to 3-4 hours a couple of days a week for long term at anchor, this will improve the battery ‘rebalancing’ that often happens when plugged in to land or when charging for a long, long time such as on a passage.)
Once again, the folks at YachtTech were very helpful. During my visit to North Palm Beach in November, Rob Ethridge did a lot of work to ensure my engines were in fine shape. One of those items was to replace my impeller on the generator. I eliminated the ‘easy’ options with a brief text/call with Rob to ensure that this wasn’t just a missing gasket (it wasn’t) or something simple. After hearing the details Rob stepped me through what I would need to do to replace the entire raw water intake pump (spares are wonderful!).
Megan helped me through as a second set of hands and eyes, and with her help the generator was up and running again in less than an hour.
The weather here has been windy but is now finally pretty settled, who knows for how long. The temperatures are colder than usual (18C last night), but still a lot warmer than -7C on Amherst Island.
Please don’t worry if you don’t hear about us for a while. If you need to reach out, feel free to use email (or you can put comments on the posts as well). Thanks for reading.