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| Barnacle Bill's Marina on the Navasink River (where it all started). |
Father's Day weekend turned out to be a lost weekend in terms of sailing. After the battery issue during our recent vacation, we had Gratitude Marina pull the house batteries and return them to the factory for evaluation (it turned out they were gone... had to replace them). Getting exact replacements required waiting through the weekend. And this was fine since we were planning to go visit my son for Father's Day.
The original plan for Father's Day was to go to New Jersey and meet Jessica's (John's fiancee's) father and his family. Part of this trip was to tour the land where the big event was going to take place. We toured a weedy patch of land that used to be a private horse-show space. It may not look like much now, but their excitement and vision make me think it will be a wonderful venue as the space (managed by her father) is transformed over the next year.
Following that, the plan was to have dinner at Barnacle Bill's restaurant which happens to be right next to Barnacle Bill's marina where we started sailing after our ASA 101 course nine years ago. (We ended up going to a different location when the line at Barnacle Bill's was way too long, but not before having John take our photo in front of the marina.)
Monday (we had off for Juneteenth) was less special...
As part of the battery replacement we had planned to do a "short-haul" - getting the boat picked out of the water and power washing the bottom along some other maintenance procedures. I finally wanted to witness a haul out and we went down to deliver Seas The Day around the corner to Gratitude.
As soon as I opened the companionway, I knew something was wrong... my nose told me.
The smell was coming from the refrigerator and freezer.
The boat was dead... no power to anything. Which after our 2020 battery issue and my study of the electrical system afterward, didn't make any sense. They had pulled the two house batteries. I had told Wade (their manager) to just switch to the #1 battery (the bow thruster/windlass battery) and things should be fine since we were plugged into dockside power. They had forgotten that fact and the switch was set to the #2 batteries, but returning the switch to #1 did not start things.
My first thought was maybe they pulled all three batteries, but the #1 battery was in place and all connected.
The two house batteries (#2 position on the battery switch) were removed as expected.
So two things were going on simultaneously... Vicky was trying to quickly throw out the contents of the fridge and freezer and get rid of the smell, and I was trying to restore power to the boat so we could get her started and take her over to Gratitude for the haul-out.
There might have been words exchanged... I'm sorry My Dear.
There seemed to be nothing that I could do to restore power to the boat. I tried all positions of the battery switch with zero effect. I tried putting the battery charger into the "power supply" mode and nothing. So I called Gratitude and Wade sent a tech down to us to jumpstart the boat.
There was no way to jump start... at least on that first visit. If you look closely at the photo above, you can see that there are many connections happening in the #2 battery compartment. The tech finally figured out that Catalina was using connections on the #2 battery posts to connect wires to the engine, the panel and the forward #1 battery. Note that is not to say all of these were connected, but some shared hot and separately shared common connections helped the current flow the way the schematics said it would.
The tech offered that he could rearrange the wiring to get the boat started, but that might make it harder for them to reinstall the batteries correctly later. We opted to skip the day's plan... we would finish cleaning up the fridge and freezer and let them return Tuesday with the new batteries prior to them taking the boat over to Gratitude Marina for the short-haul.
I asked them to show me the growth and received this video.
If you watch the video it's not really bad for 15 months in the water, but once you see the propeller, I have no idea how were were able to move the boat.
We returned to Seas The Day (back in it's berth all clean and ready to go) on Thursday night.
All the connections were made to the new batteries and the fridge and freezer were even running and all cooled down for us.
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