The watermaker is 99% installed -- but as everyone knows, the last 1% of the job takes 25% of the time. A few parts that inexplicably didn't show up in the package are being shipped, though, and we should be ready to make water soon. Testing it will be tough, though. Watermakers need clean seawater to operate, and once you start running one, you must use it at least once every few days (or "pickle" it for long term storage), or the membrane starts to grow algae and gunk. Most cruisers we've talked to with watermakers just head out without testing them, and pray they work right! We're going to buy some distilled water, and try it out on that. We won't be able to verify that the reverse-osmosis magic works, but we can test for leaks and other problems with our installation. This strikes us as being a smart thing to do before we get too far from a West Marine.
We were finally able to test our new wind generator once we left Vern and Kathy's dock in Boca Raton. Their house is on one of the myriad narrow canals which branch off from the ICW in south Florida. It was like being docked in a subdivision, and no wind at all could penetrate. When we headed back up the ICW, the wind was at our backs, so there was almost no apparent wind and the blades spun only lazily.
We anchored in North Lake Worth again, where we'd stopped on the way to Boca Raton, and there was plenty of wind. It was great watching those blades turn! We've seen as much as seven amps flowing, but mostly it's been between 1.5-4.5. It seems to be working fine at charging the batteries, but there's just one little problem. We monitor the state of the batteries and the charge flow using a Heart Link monitor, and somehow we managed to connect the wind generator sense wires backward. So, instead of showing the wind generator contribution as positive, it shows negative amps. It sort of makes sense (the power's going from the generator to the batteries, so that's "minus amps" on the generator) but it's confusing the monitor, which is starting to flash yellow to "warn" us about this accumulated deficit. Soon we're going to be in the red zone, and I have no idea what happens after that. I think we'd better crawl back into the battery area and swap the wires soon!
One problem with wind generators is that they are frequently fairly noisy. We selected the model we did, the Four Winds II, based on both power output and its reputation as a relatively quiet generator. After dinghying in to town and running errands, we returned to our cockpit and were cheered to see the wind generator spinning like crazy -- but dismayed to hear the racket. But after listening for a little while, we realized that we were hearing the Air Marine (a notoriously noisy wind generator) on a neighboring boat! Ours was only whispering gently, just as it was supposed to do.
Along with all this new gear, we're weighing down our poor waterline with lots of food. Just as in everything else, we've gotten conflicting advice on provisioning for the Bahamas. One woman advised us to stock everything we wanted to eat, because "you can't get it there, and if you can, it costs a fortune." Another woman said that she takes only a week's worth of food and buys groceries everywhere.
I like cooking, and I way prefer fresh things to canned things, but I also don't want to get caught out having to pay $20 for two chicken breasts, a few wrinkled bell peppers, and a bag of stale imitation Oreos. Also, the sort of gourmet all-natural whole-wheat organic foodstuffs we prefer (being ex-Boulder-hippie-yuppie-granola-fitness types) were impossible to find most places on the ICW, so we certainly don't expect to be able to get them in the Bahamas. So we're stocking up on staples such as coffee, dry and canned beans, brown rice, raw oats, and olive oil, lots of iced tea mix and canned concentrated juice, canned chicken and those nifty tofu blocks that we used to take backpacking, pretzels and nuts for happy hour, and other things to make up a well-stocked larder. I've got a lot of packages of cheese taking up some room in the fridge, potatoes under the starboard settee, and a dozen rolls of paper towels stuffed under the forward sink. We ought to be able to feed ourselves from our stores...but if we find (or catch!) fresh food, it will be even better.
I've been doing a lot of shopping, and also a lot of repacking. Conventional cruising wisdom says that you should never keep cardboard packaging on board in tropical areas, because it frequently harbors cockroach eggs. For most of our trip, I've ignored this, since cardboard boxes stack and pack neatly, and we haven't had any bug infestations.
But lately I've been turning Windom into a cardboard-free zone, for three major reasons. Cardboard seems to attract moisture; even when double-packed in plastic bags, our crackers got kind of soggy. Cardboard boxes usually take up more space than needed, especially as the contents get used. And finally, trash management is going to be much more of an issue in the Bahamas than it has been on the ICW, and every bit of trash we can get rid of now is less we'll have to deal with in the future. And boy, there's a lot to get rid of. It's astonishing how over-packaged most food is. Everything's getting stripped and either packed as-is in its inner liner (such as cereal and crackers), or transferred to plastic bags or cannisters. Then it gets entered into the stowage spreadsheet and tucked away.
One thing that worries us is beer. Part of being ex-Boulder-hippie-yuppie-etc. was that we developed a taste for fine microbrews ("Think Globally -- Drink Locally"), which invariably come in bottles. We've picked up a six-pack of something interesting every so often along the ICW, but bottles are not the greatest thing to store on boats. There is always a risk of breakage, they don't pack neatly, and you can't crush them into little disks when they're empty. Tecate, a reasonably decent canned beer which we used to take on river rafting trips, doesn't appear to be available here in Florida. The best we've found so far was a store that had two cases of Beck's, and along with them we bought some pint cans of a selection of British beers. Somehow we can't muster the enthusiasm to pack our boat with cases of Budweiser. I guess we'll just have to drink rum instead!
We anchored for a few nights at Lake Worth and caught up with our friends on Effie and Arcturus, who we hadn't seen since Charleston, and La Buena Vida, who we'd last seen in Stuart. Then we moved to a marina, since we'd be out of commission while installing the autopilot. As it turned out, we were assigned a slip next to Woodstock, a Gulfstar with a homeport of Evergreen, Colorado, and just down the "road" was a lovely custom motoryacht owned by another Boulderite. The owner of the motoryacht lives 6 months each year in Boulder and spends the rest of the time on his boat. He invited us to a cocktail party aboard his boat along with the other Coloradans and a few other yachties, and although Britt and I were clearly the only non-multi-millionaires in the assembled company, we enjoyed the party.
We're still not sure what to do about going to the Bahamas. The big problem with going south first is that Ft. Lauderdale has nowhere to anchor, and there are all those annoying bridges that we've already seen twice already -- unless we go outside. And if we're going to go outside, maybe we might as well just go across, and head for West End. I guess we'll cross that bridge (or that Gulf Stream) when we come to it! For now, we have a lot of work to do to get everything ready before we leave.
We are still waiting on the autopilot, which is very frustrating considering that we came to this marina expecting it to be here. Every day costs us $50, which buys us nothing more than a slip, electricity, and water; there are no showers or bathrooms, no clubhouse, and no Internet access.