Thursday, June 11, 2009

Brief update - Nassau to Charleston

Chris here... The overnight from Nassau towards Grand Bahamas was tiring but fairly uneventful, except for boat stuff. As I mentioned before, our generator stopped functioning, and then later Shiver called to let us know they could no longer see our stern light. We thought they were too far away, until I noticed that our stern light was actually not on. I tried changing the bulb, but that didn't make a difference. I then checked the circuit breaker and it was off. I turned it on, all the fans slowed down and then it popped. Great - short circuit someplace. We rigged up some temporary lights and kept going. We kept a regular radio check-in schedule with Shiver, and at our 7:00am call we found out that they were having engine issues. We kept an hourly call schedule going and at 8:00 he determined that it was the bearing in his fresh water pump for his engine cooling system. I reached out to a local boatyard via my satellite phone to see if they had a spare waterpump, and also to ask if they could tow him in if he needed to shut down his engine. Negative on the pump, positive on the tow, at $289/hour. We decided to duck in at West End on Grand Bahama to take on some more fuel and to troubleshoot our generator issue (so we can run the Air Conditioning - with no wind out here and the engine going 24 hours it got over 90 degrees in the cabin) and our navigation light issues. We figured out that our raw water intake for the generator was clogged, so we got out the dinghy pump, blew air through the fitting and unclogged it. Voila! The generator now works. Hopefully we didn't damage the impeller. We're still working on the navigation light short circuit, and it's not cooperating with regards to letting us find it. So, back to work...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Chris...if the problem is not easily fixed in West End...suggest jumping across to Ft. Pierce...Excellent inlet and Harbour Town Marina is right at the head of the inlet and they have lots of good repair guys.
Helseth Marine pulled our generator for us at CrackerBoys across the creek from Harbourtown and were EXCELLENT at doing quality work.
http://www.helsethmarine.com/index.php
Contact Us

Helseth Marine Services, Inc.
1784 Old Dixie Hwy
Vero Beach, FL 32960
772-567-9552

Fax: 772-257-6886

helseth@fdn.com

Hope you don't need to use this info but thought you might need it!! Hope all goes well!!
Best...Camaraderie/George