41:10.980 N  071:34.517 W

14/06/10  02:00

The acrid electrical fire smell dissipated fairly quickly.  The new unit was promised shipment on the Monday.  On Tuesday I received the following from Victron in Holland: “When you order a new unit, then it isn't compatible with the unit which is still working. So the other unit needs to be replaced as well.” I immediately contacted the agent in Rhode Island I had been dealing with and he was furious as well.  Later I had a call from the main Victron Sales manager in Maine and he said they had a container about to arrive in Boston with two European voltage up graded units the same physical size on board.

He offered to replace the second unit as well as  a warranty issue so it wouldn’t cost me any more money.  Rather than  wait in New York for the delivery I arranged to have them sent to Nantucket and we left the marina for Block Island at 4:45 on Sunday. With luck the  new units will be in Nantucket when we arrive on  Tuesday.

The original unit was diverted from NYC to Maine or maybe it was never sent.

Ellen and Demetra  flew back to London Saturday evening. Steve and I have been joined by John Ellis, one of the organisers of the Round the World Rally we did 12 years ago and Adam Grater, a long standing work colleague and friend,  It promises to be a merry crossing with this particular group.  We will do a watch system of 2 hours on and 6 hours off with two three hour afternoon shifts in order to have a rolling pattern which is different every day.

 Adam and I went shopping for tonight’s supper and bought 4 “Buffalo New York Strip steaks,” which I thought were Strip steaks from Buffalo New York, but turned out to be real Buffalo steaks and were actually pretty good.

We left with the same weather we had arrived with, i.e. grey, misty and raining lightly.  The trip up the East River was extremely interesting even in the gloom as we scraped under the many bridges.  We caught the tide just right and whizzed through

Hell Gate at almost 10 knots. This is an area in the midway between

Long Island Sound and the tip of Manhattan which attracts  5 knot currents and a lot of turbulence as the tides from North and South meet.

A few minutes ago the Raymarine instruments which run on 12 volts stared giving off a continuous audible “Low Battery Pilot Alarm.”  This is curious as the system shows a voltage of 13.8 volts which is consistent with a full charge.

After 20 minutes of torture the alarm has for the moment disappeared just as mysteriously as it had arrived. 
On a later watch the Radar quit and the system showed no power.   Somehow in all the confusion about the fire a navigation battery charger panel off/on switch had been switched off and never switched back on. So hopefully everything is now back to normal.

I didn’t take a lot of pictures of NY, there is something about being an ex-New Yorker which makes it impossible to walk around with a SLR hanging around your neck.  We did enjoy several shows and lots of friends,  Maybe the  highlight was a late set at The Blue Note with an 89 year old Dave Brubeck still performing brilliantly even though he had to he helped on and off the stage.

We motored all of the 125,miles to Block Island and arrived much earlier than expected as we had an extremely positive current for almost all of the way.

I attach some shots of our trip up the East River and a couple from Block Island.