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American Spirit II - Day 164; BIG Repair Day in Fiji; Wednesday, June 17, 2014



Up at 7:20 AM. Breakfast of scrambled eggs, chilled fruit cocktail and bread. Same thing every morning. Probably sounds boring having the same stuff, but having cereal, for instance, isn't as nutritious and finding real milk is almost impossible. I'm not ready to drink milk out of a can or powdered milk.



We moved our boat temporarily to the dock with shore power. We don't have any power hook ups on a mooring ball. George, the electrician, and his Indian helper showed up when they said they would, around 10:00 AM. They were here to fix our non-American charging problem. What exactly does that mean? Well, in the US we're 110 volts and we have a grounded neutral wire and the rest of the world has 220 volts, both hot and between two leads, with no grounded circuit like we do. They have a ground circuit but we're not sure how it works. Its just different than ours. At any rate, whenever we're in a marina, we can't plug into the dock power system because, first off, the American adapters we have to plug into the dock shore power don't fit. We bought a transformer, cable and a European type adapter in Tahiti, but when we plugged it into the dock there we tripped every circuit breaker on the dock. Oops. First thing George did was go to the marina office and borrow an adapter to use on the dock we were on because even the new adapter we had wasn't going to fit. Then he did an analysis of what we'd bought in Tahiti and found out that one of the wires in the cable we'd bought was wired wrong into the adapter we'd bought, and that was why it didn't work in Tahiti. To make a long story short, he fixed our problem, and the electrician 'built' another adapter onto the one we had so that we should be good all the way around the world. The only thing we had to do when plugged into shore power with one of the new adapters was to turn our water heater off because the system didn't have enough power running thru the transformer to the boat to power it properly.



While this was going on our 2 new house batteries were delivered, along with a new starter battery. The house batteries cost about 800 Fijian dollars apiece, or about $400.00 US. So I spent about $1,000.00 on new batteries today. And the house batteries weigh about 120 pounds each. Taking off the old batteries and bringing onboard the new ones takes a lot of lifting. Fortunately, Joel and the electrician's helper were up to the task. I don't lift 120 pound batteries onto boats. I'm the Captain. Once we had the new batteries on board, the electrician took our old batteries away. That was a big help as we would have had to do that ourselves. He'll get some money out of them, even if its only the lead salvage from the batteries.



At 11:40 AM the rigger, Bruce, showed up with two helpers. We replaced the broken left shroud with a new one, albeit one a little bigger in diameter than the old one - 10 mm instead of 9.52 mm. Everyone outside the US does metric, so matching our 3/8 inch wire wasn't going to happen. We also dropped the jib halyard to check the fitting under the roller furler device; and re-tuned the other shrouds and back stays on the boat. The port shrouds had stretched a little due to most of our downwind sailing being on that side of the boat. After the riggers left, while we were filling the aft water tank next to the starboard back stay, Joel noticed that 3 of the metal wires on it were broken. Here we go again. So I called the rigger back, and he said he'd make up a new back stay and install it on the boat tomorrow. He was embarrassed, as we were for not finding this sooner.



At 2:30 PM Joel climbed up the mast with his climbing harness and gear to put duck tape on the lower spreaders. I offered to winch him up, but he decided to climb instead. He actually uses ropes or strings that mountain climbers use to climb up rope.



At 3:50 PM we left the dock and reattached ourselves to mooring ball #13. By 4:20 PM we were at the showers in the marina, then on to dinner. Using the showers in the marina is better than showering on the boat because we don't use the water maker to replenish our water in the boat when we're in a marina or enclosed anchorage. Even with our filtering system, why put contaminated water thru our filters?



Back on the boat at 6:35 PM. I read while Joel played his 150,000th game of Sudoku. Since we were both tired, lights out at 9:00 PM. Which means I'll probably wake up at 3:00 AM. Stayed tuned tomorrow.



Brian Fox


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