Never a dull moment!

I forgot to mention an incident that happened enroute between Vero Beach and Cocoa. Either I was to tired when we arrived at St. Augustine or just overjoyed to be at a dock.

About an hour from anchoring at Cocoa one of our monitor alarms went off. We have an alarm for high water, explosive fumes and fire in the engine room. I could hear the alarm from the cockpit and figured it was the fumes alarm which is very sensitive and sometimes goes off if there is a buildup of fumes from the diesel. If that happens I just vent the bilge and it goes off. When I came down below and looked at the monitor it was the engine room fire alarm sounding. Talk about something that will age you 10 years in a heartbeat. I immediately looked through the little access hole into the engine room, this is where you would blast the fire extinguisher into, to see if there were flames or smoke. There were neither. The alarm goes off based on heat. I opened the port engine room door and it was hot in there. I could see that one of the connections on the back of the alternator was sparking and the rubber cover had melted on the top. Also I checked the battery monitor and it showed that the alternator was charging at over 15 volts. It should have been under 14.3 and more like 13.25 since we had been motoring for awhile. I felt the batteries and they were still cool. We lowered the RPM on the engine and I vented the engine room to try to keep it cooler. Once we arrived at Cocoa and anchored I telephoned the Balmar company to get some assistance. I talked to Rick Jones who I had known to have assisted other Island Packet owners in the past. He walked me through how to do some tests to try to determine if the problem was with the alternator or the regulator. We determined it was the alternator so I started checking it out. I was checking the wiring and connections to it. I found one connection that was a little loose but not significantly. The connection that was sparking looked as though it had some corrosion on it so I disconnected the four wires from it and sure enough all of them had some corrosion. The corrosion makes for a very bad connection and the output electricity didn't have anyplace to go. I used sandpaper to clean them off with a little WD40 to break up the rust. Once cleaned I put it all back together and ran some tests checking for proper output to the batteries. Everything looked good, no sparking and the proper charging. The next day on the way to our next anchorage I checked it about every half hour to make sure all was well. So, lesson learned, keep your connections clean.

Each day when we start out I say to Sandy, "What challenges will we face today?" Her response, "If you don't say that maybe we won't have any". Yeah right, this is a boat. Bring On Another Thousand!!