Grand Harbor Marina

On Sunday we headed off to Grand Harbor Marina one of our favorite marinas on the loop.  Chris will update you on the cruise.

We received one of two packages we were expecting here.  The one we received had our new LED light bulbs for the red and green navigation lights.  The lenses of our current lights were faded and only showed white.  The new LED bulbs are color specific.  One red and one green.  With slight modifications I was able to maintain our current bronze bezels.  Wow, are they ever bright and the amp draw is less than 1/10 of the old bulbs.  We also installed LED's in the V berth for reading.  As these are normally used with the engine off the amp reduction is welcome. 

The package we hope to get today contains our new foot switches for the windlass.  One died last week and I had to mickey mouse a toggle switch to get us by.  This is the second one we went thru since we bought the boat.  I'm changing brands from an Italian brand to an English one.  And no, they are not Lucas brand.  (Inside joke for our vintage English car friends).

The new battery for the generator was dead when we tried to start it on the cold morning at Wolf Island.  I've been troubleshooting and found that the generator is only charging to 12.4 V and normal charging systems give a 14.2 V charge.  The 12.4 is not enough to keep the AGM battery topped off and falls to 11.8 V or so when the generator is not running.   At this point I'm going to buy a battery charger to keep it topped off.  I'm going to have to think about this for awhile.

The algae in the fuel is at an all time low.  The new polishing system is working but it eats filters.  At some point I'm sure that I sure this will slow.

The engine continues to use less oil than ever.  Normally after running a dozen hours it would use up to a quart.  Now it uses less than half that.  Perhaps running the engine harder than we have in the past is better for the rings.  I'm not sure but I think the fuel burn even at the higher RPM's might not be all that bad either.  I'm tracking right now but waiting to pile on a few more miles to get an accurate read.

And the depth finder.  With the new adjustments the one on the fly bridge seems to be working 95% of the time.  Some fine tuning might be required to close the gap to 100%.   At some point I will start attacking the other one but it's a different brand and adjustment in gain may not be possible. If so, I will explore converting the transducer to Garmin and hook it into an old chart plotter down by the lower station.

Kerm