so this morning jen and i headed in to shore bright and early to check out the local island water-world (the Caribbean west marine). there was a pretty good selection and decent prices but duty was 37%! and to avoid it you had to have checkin papers and ships papers. we had yet to do this so we had to return the purchases. i did look at wind generators and they had the best one i have seen in stock for a mere .
its the air-breeze, its specked at 30kw per month in 10kts of wind. this would work out to 1kw per day or 83 amp-hours or 3.5 amps per hour over 24 hours. this is roughly equivalent to the 100 amp hours i put into the batteries each day from the genset although i would also do things like run the coffee maker and other ac powered things. those will be a thing of the past with no genset. the biggest downside to the wind generator is mounting and noise, no clear solution here.
i did not have time to check in as i had to head back to palapa for a lawyer conf call. fortunately we had great skype and i was able to dial in for the call from the boat. the call was billed at 4 hours and actually went 5. talk about painful i was sitting in the cockpit the whole time with a headset on. fortunately aimee brought me a beer for the last hour.
after this it was time to get underway. the good news was the tropical depression was going well north of us so we did not expect any material weather so there was no sense of urgency so we decided to join waka irea for happy hour in hardy bay. we had a bit of a conflict over what cups to take or not take over to waka irie which resulted in re-anchoring and delayed happy hour by an hour or so but eventually we made it over with the optimal cup configuration.
its always so much more relaxing drinking rum and watching the sunset on someone else’s boat especially if they have ice and rum! we will be inviting ourselves over more often!
Cheers – Roger
