Another day in paradise

Kerm here

We're still here at Staniel but did take a cruise down to Black Point with Chris's sister Margie on Wednesday.  Chris and Margie toured the island and I stayed to work on the boat.  We stayed at anchor overnight and woke up to a 35 knot squall.  It was short in duration but we probably go an inch of rain.  The boat needed a good fresh water wash as on our trip down we ran into some pretty good rollers that splashed over the bow that covered the boat with salt water.  This was after Chris spent 4 hours the previous day washing the boat.  By the way for you land lubbers whenever I mention knots or the kt abbreviation multiply by 1.15 to get statute miles or statute miles per hour.

It was a windy trip with wind speeds between 15 and 20 kt.  Again for you land lubbers, white caps normally start showing up at about 13 kt but the wind going against the current will kick the waves up even higher.  For our trip the waves were about 3' high with the time between the waves of about 4 to 5 seconds.  Not bad for traveling down here but on the St. Croix River nobody would leave port.

Green flash count is Chris 9, Linda 8 and me at 7.  The last one was a bit weak but Chris says it was a good enough to count as a flash is a flash regardless of duration.  So we took it.  It was the first flash for Margie, Molly, Bryan, Pat, Katie and Mary O.

We're still having problems with the batteries.  The engine battery did not have enough juice to start it when we were leaving to Black Point.  I continue to trouble shoot and may have found the problem.. May have.  I checked the output voltage on the battery charger and the leads going to each of the battery banks was at 17 volts.  I wondering if this higher voltage has been damaging the batteries.  The book on the battery charger says that the voltage should be 13.5 to 15.  If I leave on lead connected the voltage was at 24 volts. Yikes.  I e-mailed Dan and he is going to call the charger factory and see what is going on.  For now I have disconnected the charger from the circuits.  I have a bad feeling about this as I think all the batteries have been damaged and those babies were 400 bucks
X 3.

Tomorrow the O'Donnell clan plus Margie go back to 10" of new snow in Minnesota.  We will be headed off to Little Farmers Cay.  It's not a long trip but we look forward to a place we have never been before.  This will be the furthest south we have ever been as we continue down the chain of islands.  How far are we going down.  We have not decided.  Sometimes we talk about going all the way to Georgetown and perhaps even down to the Tropic of Cancer but wonder if we should save the fuel and perhaps hit The Abacos on the way back instead.  Stay tuned.