Category: Uncategorized

December 17, 2019

I added a few items to our post about 3D printing, including the latest: a way to hold our 12 volt chargers in their sockets. More here.

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:

Our Passage from Suva, Fiji to New Zealand
A Week in Opua
Northland Excursion: The Gallery and Cafe at Helena Bay
The Manawaora Bay Area
Lovely Opunga Cove
Motorua Island: Awaawaroa and Hahangarua Bays
Urupukapuka Island: Urupukapuka Bay
A Dinghy Ride to Oke Bay
Good-bye For Now, Beautiful Bay of Islands
Wonderful Waiheke Island
Our Big Day Touring Waiheke Island
Heading to Auckland
The Whangaparaoa Peninsula and Gulf Harbour
A Great End to a Great Year: Saying Good-bye to 2013

November 4, 2019

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.

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

November 21, 2019

Out with the old…

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?)

-Rich

November 8, 2019

(A rare current post from Cyndi)

Beautiful spring weather has arrived at last in Canterbury, New Zealand. At the moment, 5:30pm, the sun is shining brightly, the breeze is warm and fragrant with flowers, and it looks like this nice weather will continue for awhile. Our fans are on, the hatches are open, and I’m starting to eye our barbecue grill with thoughts of actually using it.

It wasn’t the easiest transition when, at the beginning of October, we left Hawaii and came back to New Zealand. We went from a very warm early fall to a very chilly early spring, but between our space and diesel heaters, we stayed cozy through a few cold days and nights in October.

It did help that on our arrival, Christchurch was living up to its motto of being the Garden City. It was chilly, but the city was awash in cherry blossoms, camellias, and daffodils. Then came the brightly colored rhododendrons, and now wildflowers are covering the hills, still green from the winter rains. I thought I’d miss the beautiful colors of Hawaii with its multitude of greens, exuberantly flowering trees and bushes, and beautiful blues in the ocean, but we have found all those things here in Lyttelton and Christchurch. (Below, a gallery of Lyttelton and Christchurch; you can click to enlarge and scroll through them).

In the next two weeks or so, we’ll be taking the boat up to Nelson, New Zealand, where we plan to enjoy a second summer after watching the season fade off in Hawaii. We’ve already said hello again to avocados and strawberries, and around the corner we’re anticipating blueberries, corn, and nectarines! After some time in Nelson, we’ll head to Australia, probably around February or so. At least that’s the plan.

As for now, I’m going to change direction in our blog. I’ve been working on a series of posts about the hazards of the cruising lifestyle. Rich refers to it as my “Doom and Gloom” phase, and I have to admit the blog is looking like an advertisement for Primetime (a TV show featuring stories about Americans doing bad things to other Americans).

So, while I still have a few more dangers to write about, I feel like switching gears and picking back up with our chronological posts. I’ll still put in more Cruising Lifestyle posts, but for now I’ll continue on with our story. I’m going to pick up where I left off as we left Fiji in late November 2013. Yes, it’s a long time ago, but having already done posts for certain eras (like much of our 2014 cruising in New Zealand), a lot of my work will be piecing existing stuff together. -Cyndi

Note: I am working on a post about the passages people are making now from the tropics to New Zealand, but I’ve decided to hold off on that one a bit longer.