Nobody said there’d be upwind sailing on this trip. What the heck!?!
While we are still making strong progress across the ocean we are expecting a couple of days of slightly less pleasant sailing than we have been enjoying. The low-pressure system that we’ve been keeping an eye on is dropping down across our course and will present us with some fresh and contrary winds.
This morning we started in “champaign sailing mode” with the TWA angle at 120 degrees and the boat happily moving along at 7 knots. During the day the breeze has steadily moved forward on us and we are now sailing close-hauled on port tack. We plan to keep sailing the angle and letting the wind head us until we can tack and regain a favorable angle back to the Caribbean. In a day or two as we exit west of the low we expect firm pressure and a good reaching angle - but for now, we have some upwind sailing in moderate winds to contend with. The boat is handling it well and the crew, even better. And we are eating REALLY well.
But, at sea, it seems there are always challenges.
Today we had a few interesting puzzles to solve. We realized that our generator, while running wasn’t pushing juice into the battery bank. Fortunately, we traced this to a breaker switch on the generator that had gotten bumped into the off position. A flick of the switch and we were back to pumping 230 volts and quickly charging the Tesla-like battery bank in short order. I like Occams Razor solutions.
Whenever we run the generator, we try to also run the water maker and make food at the same time. Unlike some boats, our cooking is all done with electricity. We have an electric oven and grill, induction cooktop, microwave, toaster, panini press, rice maker and the list goes on. The generator is also what drives our water maker. We can run the water-maker off the engine too, but so far the sailing has been good enough we haven’t needed to exercise that option.
Fresh Water is Important to Have at Sea
You can live three minutes without air and three days without water, but we are pretty sure we’ll all die if we go 30 days without high-speed internet. Today though, we were dancing with the worry about water: Our water-maker broke.
While the generator was running, we did what we always try to do which is click on the water maker and fill the tanks. We use water to drink, cook, and shower, and the toilets are freshwater driven. It’s obviously important. While we have enough emergency water to make the crossing, being without the water maker would be a hardship. And shortly after we fired it up… it wasn’t working. We tried several times, but each time it would quit within minutes of starting.
So we pulled the manuals, sent a few tech support emails, and went troubleshooting. The first thing we noticed was that the problem seemed to be when the high-pressure pump (the pump that pushes saltwater through a membrane that desalinates it) would kick in. It was observed that the raw water filter was dirty and that there was some air in the bowl that holds the filter. Before we left it was observed that this was dirty, but the water maker only had 58 hours on it, and I was reluctant to burn a filter too soon. In hindsight, that was pretty dumb. The filters are cheap, I probably could have found a replacement and I would have had the full flow of high-speed internet and tech support at my fingertips. Instead, I did my first filter switch on the boat at sea. I also wouldn’t have had the fear of being without the water maker driving me nuts. But I was thinking like a sailor and not like a pilot… I’ll try to be better.
After following the poorly written instructions and doing several rinses, flushes, restarts, and retries, I unspun the filter cage and replaced the raw water pre-filter with a new one. We followed the instructions to the best of our ability filled and flushed the system and then did a manual restart and pressure build up. This required one of us to adjust a little knob and keep the pressure needle in “the green zone” as we switch off and on the responsibility — 15 minutes at a time — all the while making water at about 60L an hour.
The system is designed to be mostly automatic. So when it took a dive on us again, we kicked it into auto mode and it seemed to work. We were making water again. We’ll be on a little bit of a water ration for a couple of days until our confidence in the system grows, but we are feeling better about not needing to dig into the emergency water just yet.
25° 15.114 N
22° 50.675 W
Safe watch. kb OUT.