Small Successes

There are times that it seems like we are stuck in a loop (cue Westworld theme). During these times I have found that if you look for the small things you might find that life is better than it feels. This week was a good example of that. While it may seem like we were just stuck on the boat due to the pandemic, thinking back, we actually got a lot done. If you look at the boat today, it doesn’t look or feel any different than it did last week. You have to look a little closer.

First, Shannon had been concerned with some leakage below the sink that was ruining the teak. So, as she does, she just started ripping things apart. before I know it, she has the whole sink ripped out and is resealing everything she can get her hands on. As with always, we ran into a few “might as well” moments. Since we had the sink out, and the sealant in hand, lets rip out this the old disconnected salt water faucet, and seal the hole. Also, lets reseal the new faucet we put in just after we bought the boat. This seemingly small task ended up taking the better part of two days.

While she was in doing that, I had been worried about the generator for some time. We’ve never run the generator much more than in maintenance, and testing. It seems to run fine, but last time I ran it up to temp it looked like it was running hotter than I would like. At that point I replaced the water impeller (It was clearly bad and needed replacement) and while it seems to run fine now, it still spit a bit of coolant out the overflow. I had purchased an overflow catch tank some weeks ago, but just never got around to installing it. This is where many tasks seem to sit. Almost done, but not quite. I think I have some block that says If I start I’m going to find some other much bigger problem. Well, having nothing else to do I finally tackled that install. Turns out it was a lot easier than I expected. Check one more thing off the list.

We have also had a set of high water alarms to put in the bilge, but as we do, we just never got around to installing them. This was another “why didn’t we do this earlier” thing. Its just done now. But, while we were doing that, we found that while the bilge pump is working just fine on automatic, for some reason it wont turn on when I flip the manual switch. This led me to pulling off the wiring panel again and finding a disconnected wire that I must have accidentally pulled off while I was messing with the battery charger. That’s another little success.

Finally, the batteries. I think I can call that done too. A few weeks ago Firefly replaced our batteries under warranty and I’ve been testing them ever since. We’ve now been running fully on battery and solar for nearly 2 weeks. Most of that time was overcast and rain so we were not getting much, if any, solar. As of Monday the batteries were still happy at 50% and everything was running just fine. Then, all this week we had full sun, and yesterday afternoon the solar charger officially turned off after recharging to 100%.

So, while on the surface nothing changed, we checked four items off the “list” that had been lingering for some time and can feel a lot better about the overall state of Nymeria.