Out at anchor
Anastasia
Phil May and Andrea Twigg
Sun 29 Jan 2012 03:02
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Living in a house you take it for granted that you
get electricity whenever you need it. On a yacht you have to make your
own. There are many ways of generating electricity - solar panels,
windvanes, hydrovanes (things you can drag along behind the boat when sailing),
alternators on the engines (like cars) - but for living aboard in comfort you
are fairly dependent on having a good diesel generator. So when you flick
on the generator switch in the evening and nothing happens then it is a
concern. There is no electricity company that is going to restore the
power in a couple of hours.
Our generator failed last night but we
were lucky because the ARC guys found a yacht services company this
morning that could fix it. It only took them an hour to locate the faulty
relay and replace it. Had it occurred in a couple of weeks time then a new
relay would have been hard to find and we would probably have had to last for
several months using the main engines to charge the batteries.
Andrea, Bertie and Estella went provisioning
yesterday, stocking up for the trip to the Galapagos islands. Steak
is really cheap here and chocolate is really expensive, so much so that a small
chocolate bar (75p in the UK) is the same price as a big pack of steak.
Clothes are very cheap as well. Andrea spent $60 to buy three dresses and
five pairs of shorts.
One drawback of being anchored here is that the
city of Panama pumps all its sewage into the sea, so it would be foolhardy
to swim off the boat. We are going to sail to the Las Perlas islands
tomorrow, for a few days of tropical island living, and then come back to
Panama City when the new spinnaker is ready for
collection
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