The voyage prep continues. We are now about a month away from when we will start this trip, and there’s this conflicting feeling that there’s both too much to do and not all that much. This ambiguity means that Harmony and I have a hard time waking up with a sense of urgency. We know there’s all manner of logistical stuff to prepare and finish and study, but nothing tangible enough to keep us from hitting the snooze for an hour and reading the Internet until about 11:00.
This is also the time of the prep phase where my enthusiasm for DIY projects has dwindled. I am no longer blind to the amount of time I’m spending on this damned self steering wind vane, whereas now that we have solar panels it would be so easy to just buy an electronic autopilot and be done with it.
Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got until a gravel-throat mechanic cheerily tells you that you turned a $650 fridge into an objet d’art.
We also found out that I fried our refrigerator on accident when I was trying to cut a section of corrosion out of the control wiring. It turns out that even though I had all of our battery switches off, the fridge was still directly connected to our battery bank and I “let the smoke out of it,” releasing the magic that made it work. How expensive was that mistake? Anywhere between $150 and $650, depending on what I choose to listen to from the guffawing RV fridge mechanic. Harmony has been blissfully placid about the whole thing, but I can tell that the true lack of a refrigerator, rather than the suggestion and idealization of same, has risen a small tide of panic within her.
Normally my response would be to browse the internet forums for inspiration on a DIY workaround, such as tearing apart a dorm fridge for parts or hunting down a miracle refrigeration technology that’s being used in Japan (true story). Clearly I have already done this, but with time slipping away I have no inclination to stumble down that path again. Harmony’s patience is a precious commodity, and I must conserve it for the actual journey when it will undoubtedly be in much shorter supply.
In the plus column, our recently installed solar panel is kicking ass and trickle charging my faith. I decided to increase the angle at which it wings out from the lifelines, and its power output jumped from .9 to 2.6 amps instantly. This should rise further once I finish upsizing the wiring from the charge controller to the battery. Operative word: should.
Coupled with our new LED lights, our batteries are topped up by 10am from the usage of the previous day. This usage does not yet include our nav lights or laptops, the latter of which will run off the inverter and thus be a pretty big drag, but we have a second panel on the way so I’m feeling pretty confident there.
It’s amazing how having enough electricity for one’s toys will reduce general anxiety and almost make a person forget that in a month they will be trapping their life’s love, cat-child, and worldly possessions in a soap box floating down one of the most dangerous stretches of the sea in the world.
Operative word: almost.