Monday, October 21, 2024

New York City – Cleaning Anchor Holds, Fixing Batteries, Fixing Leaks


New York City – 7 kilometers walked

Both Ana and I just love big cities. Since arriving in New York City, we have been averaging a pretty consistent 13 kilometres of walking per day exploring at random. Magnus too is a big city kid and today he took off on his own to explore NYC while Ana and I hung back to work on the battery issues and get some laundry done. I must also mention our sweet daughter Stella, who completed high school in June and is in the midst of a gap year and doing some traveling of her own. She is currently in Los Angeles with a friend of hers, visiting her grandma, who looks to be pampering them endlessly. They’ve been to Disneyland, spent two nights in a splashy hotel in Newport Beach, have been out for many shwanky dinners, and are currently at their fancy beach house somewhere in Arizona, and spent the day racing around the desert in a side by side. I don’t know who’s taking care of our house.

 

Once the sun was high enough in the sky and the solar panels were pumping out juice, I ran the equalization process on the batteries, which I was hoping might help the dead cells recover, but it did not so we then got online and started researching replacement options. I think we’ve decided on a set of four Renogy lithium 100 amp hour batteries, but still need to confirm they are going to fit into the available space and work with the existing wiring. We’re realizing that it’s a lot tougher getting stuff you need when you don’t have a fixed address. I expected that the density of the population in this area would mean we could get anything we needed. Not true - everything seems to be shipped these days and it’s just as tough finding suppliers of specialty items here as it is at home. While diagnosing the problem, I’ve been having to run our portable generator at night and in the morning to get the battery voltage where it needs to be. Next step is to remove the two bad batteries from the bank, which will reduce the capacity, but at least give us the proper voltage.

 

I took a load of laundry into the marina and found the local sailing club hosting a big regatta…with no wind. I felt terrible for them as we’ve had nothing but constant wind for days and it all whiffed out for the weekend. They didn’t even get to use these cool racing buoys they have where they are outfitted with GPS and a small engine and they actually drive themselves out to the appropriate position in the river! Never seen that before.

 


After horsing around on the boat for a while longer trying to fix a small leak we found in the forward head, we both returned to the marina to finish up the laundry, then were planning to travel to Times Square to meet up with Magnus. While Ana was waiting for the last load to dry I took a walk through the nearby Inwood Park. The weather here has been gorgeous – getting into the low 20’s every day, full sunshine, feels just like the summer, except for the cool nights, which are nice too. The park was a fully wooded areas with three main trails running throughout. I was surprised to find few people and a feeling of remoteness, as the trail ran up some steep, rocky inclines and at points offered views to the Hudson to the west and to the Harlem River to the north and east. The path I was on wrapped right around the northernmost end of Manhattan Island and beneath a bridge connecting it to the mainland. I even managed to get a bit lost and popped out of the forest in a residential neighbourbood just down the street from the main commercial area.

Ana had been speaking to Magnus and after walking the entire day, criss-crossing NYC, he decided to start making his way back and didn’t think we should bother going to meet him, which suited me fine as I was not looking forward to another two hours spent on the subway. Instead, we went for a walk to a different grocery store we hadn’t been to yet and picked up a few things. Ana made sure to triple inspect everything in the bags as last time we went shopping we had a stowaway – a little cockroach which we found in the boat and had to terminate him immediately.

 


While making the bed in the v-berth, Ana took a peek beneath it and made an interesting discovery….water. Ugh. It looked to be coming from the anchor hold. It was already late in the day and I didn’t really want to get into that job, but Ana convinced me and before long the bed was completely ripped apart and spread over the rest of the interior of the boat and the top deck of SeaLight was a disaster,  strewn with the contents of our filthy anchor hold – 150 feet of chain caked with gooey clay and muck from our last anchorage, our rusty secondary anchor, diesel and gas cans, spare anchor line, plus gear to clean it all - hoses, buckets, brushes, gloves, wet vacuum. I am quite sure we’ve never cleaned the anchor hold and it was a pretty nasty job as it was full of mud, leaves, clam shells, a stainless steel washer, bolt, and pin (I wonder where those came from?), sand, and other unrecognizable junk. We finally got it cleared out and decided to let it sit overnight to fully dry out before I would crawl in there to seal up whatever leaks I could find. The fun just never stops on a boat.

 


Magnus returned to a boat that looked like it had been sunk in a hurricane and was being lipsticked for a quick sale. He enjoyed a rum and coke on the only clean part of the top deck he could find while we put things below back together then made an excellent dinner of mushroom chicken, salad, and a yuca/carrot/onion tossup.

Tomorrow we fix the leaks, remove the misbehaving batteries from the bank, and hang out with Magnus for our last day in the big city.

1 comment:

  1. I do recall a walk in the woods with you and several others where we all
    managed to get lost differently ! Life is an adventure! 😉

    ReplyDelete