Back on the water! (Patreon)

Hi guys!

Happy Sunday, everyone! I'm typing this from a moring ball about 20 minutes from the marina. Yup, that's right, we're out on the water! I can't believe we finally got to take Athena out sailing!

Here is the link for our live tracking doohicky: https://share.garmin.com/saillife We have it turn off right now to conserve a little power. Once we have a working alternator or genset, we'll leave the tracker running 24/7 :) 

We got a lot done this week. More or less, the only thing keeping us from leaving now is a way of generating power. I hope we get the alternator or the genset up and running next week! This alternator project has dragged out way too long. It has been pretty frustrating, to be honest. The first alternator didn't fit (a promised adapter was missing). The second alternator required me to modify the tensioning arm (just like the first one, it was supposed to be "just a matter of bolting it on"). Now a third alternator is on the way because it looks like there is a hardware fault in the second one. The new-new-new alternator is supposed to get here on Friday. If this one doesn't pan out either, then I'll switch back to the stock 12V alternator (so we can get going) and figure out a different alternator solution once in the UK. I have ordered an unmodified (stock) tensioning arm, so we're ready to make the switch back to the old alternator if we have to. 

In other engine-related news. I think we managed to get a new MDI box for the D2-40 engine. It was supposed to get here before the weekend but got delayed. A friend from Sweden came up with a cool way of adding a temperature and oil pressure alarm, completely bypassing the MDI. That'll go hand-in-hand with my plan to add a momentary switch to start the engine quickly if the MDI dies on us again.

Ava and I are going to sail back to the mooring ball closest to the marina. It should be a little more comfortable there tonight, and we'll be closer to the marina in the morning - we need to charge the batteries *sigh*. We'll be back later to reply to comments :) 

Thank you so much for your support! Stay safe :)