Blog

Still waiting on the weather, here in New Zealand, where it’s…windy. Very windy. And not warm. Because winter. But, there’s hope for a window tomorrow. More on that at the end.

Because we can’t leave, and because I can’t leave well enough alone, we did a big boat project this week. We added more power. Background: our boat is a US boat. So it’s wired for US electricity, which is 110 Volt. Which is great if you are in the US, Canada, Mexico, or Panama. Everywhere else? Not so much. Because the rest of the world is based on a 230 Volt system. That’s why, if you go on a European vacation and plug your hair dryer into the socket, unpleasant things happen. It’s also why, when our batteries get low, we have to run our engine to charge them up even though we are in a marina with electric service. We can’t use it. I decided to fix that.

There are a variety of ways to go about this and most of that is TLDR. Suffice it to say that since we don’t spend much time in marinas (except here in New Zealand because weather!), I went with less expensive. We wired a 230 Volt shore power inlet to a battery charger and from there to our batteries. So now, we can plug in, charge up our batteries, and run our US gear without a problem! It’s glorious! I mean, our US gear mainly consists of a space heater, but still! This project was notable for two major milestones: first, we completed it without any trips to the store to get stuff I forgot. Because I made a list. And a circuit diagram. And I calculated my wire sizes to minimize voltage drop in advance. I went to the store and actually sounded like I knew what I was doing. The second milestone was a complete absence of drama. We wired it up, plugged in, and it worked. No sparks. No short circuits. No smell of ozone. It’s possible that competence is happening. Of course, my grandfather always said “even a blind squirrel…” I’m going with the former.

Anyway, project done. We hope to leave tomorrow (Monday for us, Sunday for you) It is, honestly, a pretty tight window to get to Minerva reef before the next low pressure system and the conditions are going to be sporty but if the models hold overnight, we think we have a good safety margin. Hopefully then, next week’s blog post will be written from warmer climes. Hopefully. For those of you who want to keep tabs, there are a couple of options. First, there’s our PredictWind tracking page. That’s always been there and it’s real-time. Second, I added our boat’s navigational data onto the web page. If you look at the top bar, you will see our current position, heading, boat speed, wind speed, wind angle, etc. It updates every 15 minutes. There was actual coding involved, which was scary. I had to wrestle a python and beat some dude named JSON into submission to get it done, but it works. Finally, in the side bar next to each of our blog posts, you’ll now see a link to a YouTube video short. The goal is to upload a short video each day of our passage. By “short” I mean 1-2 minutes. So, if you aren’t already following our YouTube channel, check it out! Hopefully we’ll be better with this than last year’s attempt. Longer form videos are just not happening. That editing, though!

And no, we have not figured out what caused the smoke. I’m going with “figment of my imagination”. Although how my brainwaves set off the smoke detector I am not sure.

Hopefully, we’ll see some warmer weather. SOON!