New Zealand’s Christmas tree is again fitting for our card as we’re in New Zealand again (still?). This pohutukawa tree has brilliant red blossoms at about Christmas time each year.
We just got back from a road-trip around the upper west side of the South Island where they have another, very similar Christmas tree – the Southern Rata. Between the two, our holiday has been filled with red and green!
We hope your lives are joyous during this holiday season, and year-round.
Yep, I had a bunch of posts here covering the end of 2013. I’ve moved them to their proper chronological spots, but I’ll leave the links here for now. They include:
We arrived in Nelson last Saturday night at 1 AM (Sunday morning?) after a 43 hour motorboat ride from Christchurch. The weather window we got was a total surprise to us. I was working on our new Iridium Go satellite modem and downloading GRIBs from Perdict Wind and just happened to spot suitable weather if we departed the next day. We did and it was a very nice trip.
We’re happy to be back in Nelson (we were here in 2016) but sad to leave Lyttelton and Christchurch. We had a great time there and it really felt like home. Te Ana Marina is wonderful and we’ve really come to love Christchurch.
We wanted to make a few stops in the Sounds on the way to Nelson, but the forecast called for conditions to turn nasty. If we’d stopped, we could have been stuck in the Sounds for days, so we pressed on.
Free tracking from Perdict Wind if you’re subscribed to PW and buy your Iridium SIM card from them.
Speaking of satellite phones and Predict Wind, above is the free tracking site we got from them. The Iridium Go sends them our position every hour and their software updates the tracking page (here – note that this page shows current wind and not the wind we had on our trip). We can even add little “blog posts” to the tracking page. We can even add some photos as we go. We’ll post a link to this from now on when we set off on a long passage.
I can’t say enough about how great Predict Wind has been for us. We’ve been using it for about four years. Each time we’ve had a question for them, their customer service has gone beyond our expectations and well into excellence! When we saw that we could buy an Iridium Go from them to replace our old Iridium 9575 sat phone (here’s our review of that piece of junk), we jumped at the chance. While I still hate Iridium, Predict Wind made the new purchase experience and installation much less painful.
We used Predict Wind’s PWG weather model for our trip and as is usually the case, it was very accurate. (You can also view three other weather models on their site, including ECMWF.) We have the weather routing preferences tuned such that it very accurately predicts our boat speed and capabilities. -Rich
And in with four new Trojan T-105 six volt, flooded-cell batteries, just like the ones that came out (well, cleaner and hopefully working better than the old ones!).
I set a Google alarm to remind me each month to top off the battery water. The last few months, the battery water required has been very uneven and getting worse each month. I disconnected the batteries to measure the voltage of each individual battery and noticed it was also getting pretty uneven.
As these batteries were five years old, I’ve been on the fence as to what to do about it. Five years isn’t bad, but they’ve been well cared for and I would have liked to get seven years of service. On the other hand, I don’t want to have to start fighting battery failure issues. I tried to equalize the batteries to coax some more life out of them but that was unsuccessful. Two batteries would not reach the 15.8 volts required to equalize them, at least with the small AC charger I have. The batteries were heating up and while the electrolyte specific gravity was climbing, the current wasn’t going down, nor was the voltage rising. I gave up. New batteries.
I get what Cyndi calls my hobbies. My most recent hobby was researching batteries and after looking at a lot of options, here’s what I decided was and wasn’t right for us.
1. AGM Batteries: AGMs require a 100% charge at least every third cycle (Lifeline AGM manual), otherwise, they suffer premature failure. With our increased solar capacity we can and do regularly charge our battery bank to 100% but I am still uncomfortable spending twice the price of flooded batteries on batteries that might only last two years. What if we go through a long cloudy period? We’d be running the engine a lot to get to 100 percent.
2. Lithium Ion: While I know quite a few boaters have installed them, I still feel like the lithium ion battery bank I’d want to install is not yet available (or not yet available at a price point I can justify to myself). Maybe in five years?
3. Flooded Lead-Acid: They’ve worked well for us. I found Trojan T-105s for about $200 USD each here in Christchurch. These are American made batteries with a good reputation. I installed my first set of T-105s in a cabin cruiser I owned over 30 years ago. I decided to go with these again, and by the time they’re ready to replace, maybe lithium will be a more attractive option for us.
Note: We’ve been having trouble with the carbon monoxide detector being triggered by hydrogen from the charging batteries and that was one of the reasons I looked so hard at the other technologies. It might be that the problem with the old batteries was causing excessive gassing. So far, with the new batteries, no alarms! Fingers crossed that this continues. (Who knew that a CO alarm could be a battery state of health detector too?)
