1/27/01 | Waiting for weather

miami, north dakota

White sand stretches to the water; palm trees sway above us in the breeze. The ocean is blue and the sky is bluer. So what are we doing all bundled up in fleece sweaters and earmuffs?

It's probably rude to complain about the weather to people who may be reading this in Colorado or Maine. It's been getting up to 60° during the day; it probably won't get that warm in, say, Boston, until sometime in March. But for Florida, this is a major cold wave, and our heater has been working overtime. Every so often we cast longing looks at our swimsuits and shorts, all still packed away.

Despite the chill, Miami Beach has been a fun place to be stuck while waiting for a break between the cold fronts. We've gone to the movies, visited with friends and relatives, eaten out way too many times, and continued to pack the boat with stuff. This place wins the award for easiest grocery shopping on the ICW:  a Publix grocery store is around the corner from the dinghy dock, close enough to wheel a cartful of food from store to dink. Each week, grocery carts accumulate by the dinghy dock, first one, then three, then twenty. Eventually a store employee shows up to roll them back around the corner to the store, and the cycle begins again.

Our lists are getting shorter. We'll be ready to jump on that weather window as soon as it shows its little face. Late last week, we thought we might get a break for today. The wind would be from the northeast but very light, not enough to whip up any waves, and we could just motor across. The forecast looked promising, so on Friday we ran into town to do laundry, pick up our mail, and get the last batch of groceries. But after fifteen minutes standing in line at the post office, I was informed our mail hadn't arrived yet. So much for our possible weather window.

Early this afternoon I went back to the post office. "Nothing under 'Stern'," the clerk told me. I asked her to try "Bassett", and she came back empty-handed again. I was really bummed out. Our mail service is near Jacksonville, and they had sent out the mail on Tuesday. Ridiculous. Then I remembered the advice given in cruising guides about getting mail in third-world countries where nobody speaks English very well. "Could you check under 'Windom', please?" Bingo.

where the folks get their volts

Last Monday we lifted anchor -- not an easy task after it had settled well into the thick Miami mud over the past week and a half -- and motored over to the Miami Yacht Club. We were told they charged only $25/night, but we couldn't raise them either by phone or VHF, so we just pulled up to their dock -- or tried to. The wind was howling out of the northwest, exactly perpendicular and away from their T-dock, and it took me three tries to even get Windom close enough to the pier for Britt to get a line over a piling. He jumped off and I quickly tossed him a second line. By the time he had made both lines fast, Windom sat parallel to the dock...about fifteen feet off! Using the forward line as a spring and hitting hard reverse, we got the stern in enough to pull the line in a few feet; then we went forward on the aft line and pulled in the forward line, and so on until after twenty minutes or so we finally lay next to the dock. Fortunately the weather was not conducive to sitting out in the cockpit, and we didn't have many spectators.

We'd managed to get a great price on the rental of a pickup truck for the day, and a friend lent us a hand-truck (and a hand!). When we'd originally installed our batteries, Britt had snagged a few 2x4s from the marina dumpster and used them to extend the boom a few feet; this time, he strapped our whisker pole to the boom to give us a longer reach. We ran a halyard through the end of the pole and tied a double-looped knot on the end that we would clip into the battery handles, then wrapped the other end around a cockpit winch. With this much mechanical advantage, it was easy to hoist the two 165-pound batteries out of the lazarette and swing them over onto the dock.

After exchanging the old batteries for new ones at the distributor's warehouse, we took advantage of our temporary wheels to run a few more errands. We filled our propane tanks and spent money all around Miami at our usual chain stores (Boat US, West Marine, and Radio Shack). The new batteries went in as easily as the old ones came out, and we were hooked up and running again just after the sun went down. They weren't quite completely charged up, and the dock power kept going off so we weren't able to charge that way, but the next morning the solar panels topped things off, and we appear to be in business again.

So why did our batteries flake out? After getting more information from Lifeline and their distributor, then going through our manuals and records, we suspect the problem lies with our inverter/charger. AGM batteries appear to be much more sensitive to overcharging than other marine batteries. In particular, they are sensitive to the "float" charge -- the charge that a power supply delivers when the batteries are actually already charged or mostly charged.

Our Balmar alternator regulator is a "smart" programmable three-stage charger with an AGM program built in, so when we motor a long way, it handles things correctly after the batteries are fully charged. However, we modified the program a little to charge the batteries in "bulk" mode for a longer period of time, after our batteries had started to give us problems and we thought we weren't charging long enough. This could have contributed to the decline of our batteries. Our Statpower Prosine inverter/charger, while also a three-stage system, doesn't know that AGM batteries exist. It has settings only for flooded and for gel batteries, and they can't be changed. We have it set at gel, as recommended, which gives lower voltages than the flooded setting (and since we have a temperature probe it keeps the voltage from getting too out of hand), but the float voltage is too high for AGMs. This means that whenever we sat on a dock, plugged in to shore power, we overcharged the batteries. Although we usually anchor out while cruising, we were in marinas for long stretches of time over the past year and a half, installing gear. Once the batteries charged up initially, the charger kept them at the too-high float voltage. It hardly seems possible that 13.5 volts would damage the batteries, when they are initially charged with 14.4, but Lifeline's info sheet stresses that the proper float voltage is important. Too bad they didn't give us that info sheet when we originally got the batteries.

When we first started noticing problems, we called Lifeline, and they recommended we equalize, which is essentially overcharging (in a controlled way) for a short period of time. Even though this was recommended by the manufacturer, we are wary now, since when we equalized the second time, things got worse in a hurry. (The first time we equalized, about a year ago, the batteries improved slightly.)

We appreciate Lifeline standing behind their product and giving us new batteries for free. We will baby our new batteries and see if they last; if not, we're switching to another type. We are also disappointed that our inverter/charger isn't sufficiently programmable to handle AGMs. We sure like it as an inverter, but as a charger it seems like it's the wrong choice for this type of battery. Fortunately, we expect to spend little time in marinas now that we've finished all the big installation projects we had planned, and now that we know we can't just plug in to shore power and ignore it, we can do things properly.

eclectic electric

Electricity is important to most cruisers (other than those few holdouts who use kerosene signal lamps and navigate with sextants), and with two computers on board, we're definitely on the wired side. One thing that always seemed silly to us is that although our computers run on DC voltage, when we plug them in we convert the DC voltage supplied by the boat's batteries to AC via an inverter, then back to DC via the computer's power brick. That's got to be inefficient. To increase the efficiency a little, we have been using a mini-inverter that plugs in to our accessory socket (a cigarette-lighter type receptacle) when we don't need to have the whole AC system on, but it's still DC-to-AC-to-DC.

But on our last mega-run to Radio Shack, we bought a DC adapter which plugs into the accessory receptacle and converts our 12 volt boat power to whatever voltage we need. In the case of our laptops, that's 18.75 volts. It saves us a few amps over the inverter, and in any event it seems a lot more logical to avoid the AC conversions.

We also bought the makings for another boat project:  a security alarm. We've heard enough stories about theft in the Caribbean, and enough recommendations for security systems, that we figured we'd best be prepared. We'll wire a motion detector to our bright cockpit light and a loud siren, in addition to taking the usual precautions (which we don't usually do) of raising and locking the dink at night, and locking the companionway when we're away.