July 9, 2010  12:13 pm

Now What?!#*%++=$$$4444

“The # {CHANGE TO AT} $%^&*! Regulator is not working”

Yesterday the auto pilot was fixed up with a new brain and compass and worked like a charm as we motored and sailed from New Port to Cuttyhunk harbor from 5:00 pm to around 9:30 pm to anchor there for the night.   We had no real dinner since we did not want to get seasick trying to prepare it going through ten foot swells. What good is a dinner if you cannot keep it down. David's anti sea sickness wrist bands do not seem to be doing what they are supposed to. We all had a good night’s sleep and made plans to leave early in the morning to Provincetown where we will top off the gas tanks one last time and get off shore.

Not to be. I think the spirits are not quite ready to allow us to cut our lines loose from this continent. We left Cuttyhunk around 6:30 am. The engines started without a hiccup, the autopilot worked fine and in spite of thick fog navigation was not much of a problem. Thank you GPS! And then I heard a loud NOW WHAT? Both battery banks are not charging even with both engines running at full RPM. Actually there was a  net drain of current from the batteries. It was quite obvious that this was a regulator problem since the likelihood of two alternators failing at the exact same time is quite miniscule.  To cut to the chase we tried to troubleshoot the regulator with the scant information available on 3 sheets of paper to no avail. Even the manual I located on the web was not much help. So here we are in good old Marion at Burr Brothers Marine. I am getting on the fly education in marine electronics and do not mind it at all. David on the other hand seems to be a bit annoyed with all the delays I guess because of the time pressure to go back to relieve Steve’s burden. The Burr Brothers electrician thinks the whole episode was related to a loose wire that was disconnected and reattached during the maintenance check of the boat a month ago. Once he retightened the wire everything seemed to be OK. But both the Skipper and I, strong believers in “belt and suspenders”, thought we should take another regulator with us in case this one acted up again. We certainly do not want to get caught with our pants down in the middle of the Atlantic. So we are waiting for the arrival of the new regulator, which should not be too long off.

I think most things that can break already did break, the rest should be a piece of cake !!!