Marsh Harbour

Jan 16 thru Jan 19

--Blogpost written by Bob

Tuesday, January 16

Wow!  A day with full sunshine and no high wind!  We need this kind of day!  In listening to the Cruiser's Net this morning on VHF channel 68, a cruiser currently on a mooring ball in Hope Town confirmed that today is garbage collection day.  Another cruiser came on and said he thought the garbage was collected on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.  Someone had to tell the second cruiser that today is Tuesday.  It was pretty funny in the moment.  It ended with a lot of funny comments from other cruisers.

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It is now 1 PM and we’re making fresh water using our RAINMAN. Since it was so noisy last time when we used it in the cockpit, this time we are using it on the bow of s/v Rainy Days and the noise is a little more tolerable because the unit is a little further away from us and it is running in the open atmosphere. The hum of it’s little 50cc engine reverberates through the boat’s fiberglass deck. 

Our RAINMAN desalinator is operating on our foredeck.
We tried this location because of the high noise level.

Our 40-gallon forward tank had run dry in 5-1/2 days, meaning that we used about 3.7 gallons of fresh water per day per person, a significant improvement in consumption over our last tank (5 gallons per person per day).

Meanwhile our solar panels are producing about 11 amps of electrical power. The entire time we’ve had overcast skies and rainy days, we’ve had to run the boat’s engine for about an hour in the evening. It is clear that the voltage controller that came with our new engine does not allow much electrical power into the battery bank. (I intend to remedy this during the summer by installing a Balmar-brand voltage controller made for this purpose.)

After about 45 minutes of running, I went forward to check on the fuel level in the RAINMAN and I noticed that a hole had chafed in the inlet hose by rubbing against a the pump. The pressure on the RO unit had dropped to zero.  This hole in the intake hose allowed the pump to run dry for an unknown period of time (15 to 30 minutes) and I think the pump is now ruined.  I don't know how to pickle the RO unit without a functioning pump.  I sent an email off to RAINMAN in Australia--we'll see what they recommend.  We can get by without the use of our water maker for the remainder of this trip since we can purchase fresh water.

Wednesday, January 17

The macerated remains of the old lift pump impeller is shown
in the upper left hand corner of this photograph.  The
impeller's cover is shown in the lower right.

We spent most of the day tracking down an impeller for our RAINMAN's lift pump.  We can't pickle the RO unit without a functioning lift pump.  We finally found one (under a Johnson part number instead of Jabsco part number at Marsh Harbor Boatyard--it cost $52, twenty one dollars more than in the U.S.!  Tomorrow I will pickle the unit and store it until we are back in the Chesapeake Bay.

We got a slip at Marsh Harbour Marina because we
just needed some civilization on another
(lousy) cloudy and rainy day.

We got a slip at Marsh Harbour Marina in the early afternoon, after having lunch at the Jib Room.  The entire time we were entering the slip our depth sounder alarm was going bonkers, reading very close to 5 feet (which is our draft).  We made it in--it was about an hour before low tide.  We decided to stay here in this slip for five days, before leaving for Hope Town.  The rate is a mere $0.80 per foot of boat length per night.

I spent the afternoon cleaning the bits of rubber impeller and black dust particles out of the water maker.  This required a significant amount of disassembly.  I got it all back together without any parts left over--that's always good!  I also added a piece of larger vinyl hose over the area that was chafed (by rubbing against the high-pressure pump), after I shortened the intake hose to eliminate the chafed hole.  (Our spare hose came in very handy!)

I cut the intake hose off where it had chafed a hole and
added a vinyl hose sleeve (red arrow) over the area
so it couldn’t happen again. I think that 
something like this should have been 
included in the original design.

Next year, I will carry two spare impellers--but I will buy them when we are back in the U.S.

Thursday, January 18

Our first night in a slip after 23 nights at anchor (20 of them here in Marsh Harbour) was a very cool night--it got down to near 60 degrees! The high temperature today is forecast to be only 65 degrees. The wind is currently blowing at 25 knots and we’re shifting around quite a bit in the slip-our dock lines have slackened with the higher tide.

It’s really nice having the ability to take nice hot showers daily when in a marina and we definitely took full advantage of this last night. 

We are docked on the east dock (shown above).

The lower level of this building is the Jib Room.

The outside patio at the Jib Room. 

We had lunch at the Jib Room, at the end of our dock. As I finished my club sandwich, I shared some of the bread with a few gulls that were hanging out on the pilings nearby. They would swoop down and pick up the tiniest scrap of bread. Before you know it, a dozen or more seagulls were competing for the few scraps of bread. The scraps that the seagulls didn’t get, were devoured by the fish that hung out below the restaurant’s deck.

A seagull swoops down to the surface
of the water to get scraps of bread.

Today was a nice relaxing day, albeit a bit cold for the Bahamas.

Friday, January 19

We missed the Cruiser’s Net this morning but I had a nice hot shower while it was progressing. The sky is overcast but, thankfully, the wind died down from its 25 knots of yesterday. There is a 10-knot breeze out of the east. At 9 AM the sun started to break through the overcast sky.

In Marsh Harbour Marina the top halves of the pilings
are painted white. Coupled with our white decks
and white fenders, the tiniest bits
of color stand out.

On our agenda for today is pickling our water maker and putting it away for the duration of this season. I’ve used the water maker three times: heat from the exhaust ruined a coaming box in the cockpit ($50 replacement cost back in the U.S.) the first time I used it, the second time was uneventful, and on the third time the inlet hose chafed through causing the impeller on the lift pump to fail (our cost was $51 for a new impeller plus $34 in taxi rides). So, I would have been ahead if I had simply purchased all the fresh water we needed, even at the inflated cost of $0.18 per gallon.  (If the water maker wouldn't have cost so much, a burial at sea would have occurred in short order!)

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After lunch we tried to run the RAINMAN so that we could flush out the salt water and rinse it internally with fresh water and then pickle it.  It ran and primed the system (new impeller was working OK) but I couldn't develop any pressure (which means the packing in the high-pressure pump isa probably shot.  So I did the best I could at pickling the unit using spare parts I had onboard.  (I should point out that I got excellent service out of RAINMAN in Australia!)

I did the pickling using spare parts I had
onboard--I call this my MacGyver setup.

I used a spare fresh water pump to get up to 30 PSI which was required to flood the system with pickling solution.  I had to jury wire it to the switch panel with wires that were really too small for the job but they worked.  I then used spare bits of hoses and hose clamps to connect the pump.  We put fresh water in the bucket and sucked it out and into the RO unit with the pump.  Then we did the same thing with the pickling solution.  We will have to deal with the water maker's problems when we get back to Florida.  Until then, we will buy fresh water as needed like we did last year.

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For general information, I have made an update to my old blogpost entitled "My Favorite Pocket Knives" from April 11, 2016.  I've added my current favorite pocket knife and referenced an excellent article I recently found on the subject. It's worth checking out!

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In late afternoon we took the dinghy to Skagg's Market and bought two lobster (Bahamians call them crayfish) tails and two NICA fillets.  NICA is a fish like grouper but it is imported from Nicaragua (since it is now offseason for grouper here in the Bahamas).  And now it's time for happy hour...ahhh

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