NEW WIRING; PANAMÁ NEWS;
Isla Contadora, Islas Las Perlas, Panamá, Friday, 23 October 2009
Heinz has done a great job of re-wiring our engine room. Although he intended Vilisar to be “hell for stout and very simple”, George Friend of Sidney, British Columbia, the original builder of the boat, did install one battery for starting the engine and providing electricity for the navigation lights. Cabin lights were provided by the petroleum lamps that we still have on board. Bill Taylor of Maple Bay, B.C., left this set-up. It was Joe May, the next owner who re-wired the boat for general electricity use including instrumentation. He was also a ham operator, so would have needed 12 volt power for the radio too.
We are still living from this. But, of course, over the years, the wiring has been attacked by the salt-air environment, and we have several times had to do some modifications in the engine room. As a result of various people working on it, the harness in the engine room had become a hodgepodge and prone to failing. With recent engine work, some of the wires had also become damaged. We decided it was finally time to re-do it all root and branch.
Heinz is Austrian and a trained electrical and electronics man. After a look inside the engine room he drew up a new scheme. “The bad news is that you are going to be faced with regular problems, large or small, in the future and perhaps you just want to live with that. Or we can pull it all out and start again, getting rid of the old wires, now badly corroded inside the insulation, and re-wiring with marine grade cables. The good news is that it is basically a simple set-up and should be easy to do.” We decided to go for broke.
It took two days and the result is night and day. All the shorter cables were done with marine grade materials i.e., each individual strand of copper wire is coated with zinc. The longer cables were regular copper but soldered at the terminals to prevent corrosion. This approach offsets the cost of an electrician to do the soldering versus the significantly higher cost of marine-grade cable. We spent a few hours in town at Centro Marino, for example, buying the materials: #1 or #2 strength wire cost about $9 a foot; the lighter wires were correspondingly cheaper and, of course, simple copper wire was fairly cheap. Altogether the bill for materials came to about #350. Abernathy and Centro Marino are marine chandlers and probably the only place to get marine grade wire in Panama City. We bought the terminals, shrink-tubing, etc. at Electonico Caribe on Avenida España. Don’t buy anything you don’t need at the marine chandlers: they are what the Germans call an “Apotheke”, i.e., damned expensive, like a pharmacy. We forgot to pick up a few feet of shrink tubing and wound up paying about six times as much at the Amador branch of Centro Marino than we would have done at Electronico Caribe. The actual work took another day and a half.
Since our house batteries have been having some problems holding a charge, Heinz suggested draining the old acid and replacing it with new. We did this and found it an improvement. As part of the engine work we had also had the Bolmar 75-amp alternator inspected and rejuvenated. So, along with our rewired solar panels, we are now doing pretty well for electricity. We celebrated by watching a movie one evening on the computer.
Except for provisioning with fresh foods, there was nothing now to stop us leaving for The Perlas. This is a group of mostly-deserted tropical islands some 35 Nm SE of Panamá City. Isla Contadora, where we are currently at anchor, is well-populated, mainly with the opulent houses of the well-to-do from Panamá City. There is an airstrip and scheduled small-aircraft flights from Albrook Airport. It also has some shops and a part-time internet café.
We originally intended to get out of Panamá City on Tuesday. But an invitation to drinks aboard S/V Batwing with our American friends Ron and Diane resulted not only in hangovers, but incomplete stowage as well. So we just put it off for another day. It was just as well. The weather has been strangely winter-like conditions. For those of our readers who are putting on the furnaces back in Frankfurt or Baltimore, winter here means the dry season, with steady drier winds, mainly NE Trades. At present, the Pacific is under the aegis of El Niño, meaning much less rainfall in Panamá and much more in Peru and Ecuador. For the last few days, however, we have been getting steady and acceptably strong S and SW winds, day and night. Instead of huge thunderheads in mid afternoon, the sky has been remaining azure blue with puffy clouds scudding by. Great sailing weather, especially for The Perlas. Batwing left on Tuesday without us and reported a great sail with reefs taken in their junk sails. What we didn’t find out until we met up with them a day later at Contadora was that halfway to the islands they ran into heavy squalls and blinding rainfall.
The dingy was already on the foredeck when dawn broke on Wednesday. We had lifted the two parts separately onto the boat on Tuesday, first scrubbing the barnacles and marine (-grade?) growth and then applying a new coat of hard bottom paint, waiting for it to dry and then nesting the second part aboard to do the same procedure. On Wednesday, it only needed to be strapped down tight for the voyage. The engine came to life (ahhh!) at 0630, purring away like a Harley Davison, and our own anchor chain was hauled aboard. Of course it was covered with the slimy mud common to the coast of Panamá City and it was only possible to get a grip on the chain by wearing fishermans gloves. On Tuesday, the day before, amongst our other preparatory activities, Josh of S/V Tropic Isle had come over to pick up his two series anchors, which we had inherited, so to speak, when a steel yacht had dragged down on us two months ago. We had been riding on them in addition to our own 45-pound Bruce anchor while we were without an engine. It took several hours to get those anchors untangled and hoisted into his dinghy. By the time we were finished, we were covered in slimy mud and looked like participants in a black-and-white minstrel show.
But now we were ready! The dirty anchor chain was left on deck to be cleaned in the sandy bottoms out in the islands. Up went the red main and staysails and we were off. Soon, we shut the engine down and even put up the yankee. We were doing over 5 knots with a slight heel to port. Glorious! It was so liberating finally to be shot of Panamá City!
The good sailing lasted for half of the distance before the breeze dropped in the face of a series of rainy squalls coming in from the SW. They seemed to take the breath right out of the air. At one point we simply hove to in order let one of these sheets of rain and dark cloud pass in front of us and then turned on the engine to complete the trip. It was important for us to test the engine work anyway, and to be sure that we were no longer going to be leaking huge amounts of engine oil into the bilge, the reason after all why we aborted out last departure for French Polynesia two months ago. The good news is that the new $4 rear oil seal is working and we are not loosing oil. The alternator was also putting out plenty of power into our new wiring system. There was no bad news.
We arrived at the anchorage off the north shore of Contadora Island about mid-afternoon. There was Batwing and the big catamaran, Sunbow (John and Sharon) and Lea Scotia (Trevor, Carissa and their three-year-old daughter, Kira from Seattle) already at anchor. We were promptly invited to a drink aboard Batwing. Oops! Here we go again.
It is so great to be out of the city and back in the islands. The weather is just about perfect. Yes, there was a heavy rainsquall in the early morning hours yesterday. But otherwise temperatures are staying around 30 degrees Celsius, blue skies and puffy clouds. Kathy has a lot of proofreading to do and the Iridium signal is a bit spotty. But Lea Scotia is getting internet right on aboard their yacht and Trevor is a proofreader too, now. Kathy has been going over there to send and receive and this afternoon, now that Lea Scotia and Batwing and Sunbow have all left, we shall row ashore to inspect the island and visit the internet café. We hope the Iridium signal will be better when we move to another island or to the other side of Contadora.
There are still relatively few boats here. Soon, however, other yachts will be riding the strong SE Trades up from Ecuador for the winter sailing season and yachts will be coming down from Central America or through the Canal from the Eastern Seaboard or from Europe. For the moment we are just a few of us here and we are content. From the cockpit where I was drinking my morning coffee, I spotted about six or seven whales carryinbg on a great acrobatic show about a mile away. Underneath us reef fish in their thousands were providing another type of water show. I can live with this!
Isla Contadora, Islas Las Perlas, Panamá, Friday, 23 October 2009
Heinz has done a great job of re-wiring our engine room. Although he intended Vilisar to be “hell for stout and very simple”, George Friend of Sidney, British Columbia, the original builder of the boat, did install one battery for starting the engine and providing electricity for the navigation lights. Cabin lights were provided by the petroleum lamps that we still have on board. Bill Taylor of Maple Bay, B.C., left this set-up. It was Joe May, the next owner who re-wired the boat for general electricity use including instrumentation. He was also a ham operator, so would have needed 12 volt power for the radio too.
We are still living from this. But, of course, over the years, the wiring has been attacked by the salt-air environment, and we have several times had to do some modifications in the engine room. As a result of various people working on it, the harness in the engine room had become a hodgepodge and prone to failing. With recent engine work, some of the wires had also become damaged. We decided it was finally time to re-do it all root and branch.
Heinz is Austrian and a trained electrical and electronics man. After a look inside the engine room he drew up a new scheme. “The bad news is that you are going to be faced with regular problems, large or small, in the future and perhaps you just want to live with that. Or we can pull it all out and start again, getting rid of the old wires, now badly corroded inside the insulation, and re-wiring with marine grade cables. The good news is that it is basically a simple set-up and should be easy to do.” We decided to go for broke.
It took two days and the result is night and day. All the shorter cables were done with marine grade materials i.e., each individual strand of copper wire is coated with zinc. The longer cables were regular copper but soldered at the terminals to prevent corrosion. This approach offsets the cost of an electrician to do the soldering versus the significantly higher cost of marine-grade cable. We spent a few hours in town at Centro Marino, for example, buying the materials: #1 or #2 strength wire cost about $9 a foot; the lighter wires were correspondingly cheaper and, of course, simple copper wire was fairly cheap. Altogether the bill for materials came to about #350. Abernathy and Centro Marino are marine chandlers and probably the only place to get marine grade wire in Panama City. We bought the terminals, shrink-tubing, etc. at Electonico Caribe on Avenida España. Don’t buy anything you don’t need at the marine chandlers: they are what the Germans call an “Apotheke”, i.e., damned expensive, like a pharmacy. We forgot to pick up a few feet of shrink tubing and wound up paying about six times as much at the Amador branch of Centro Marino than we would have done at Electronico Caribe. The actual work took another day and a half.
Since our house batteries have been having some problems holding a charge, Heinz suggested draining the old acid and replacing it with new. We did this and found it an improvement. As part of the engine work we had also had the Bolmar 75-amp alternator inspected and rejuvenated. So, along with our rewired solar panels, we are now doing pretty well for electricity. We celebrated by watching a movie one evening on the computer.
Except for provisioning with fresh foods, there was nothing now to stop us leaving for The Perlas. This is a group of mostly-deserted tropical islands some 35 Nm SE of Panamá City. Isla Contadora, where we are currently at anchor, is well-populated, mainly with the opulent houses of the well-to-do from Panamá City. There is an airstrip and scheduled small-aircraft flights from Albrook Airport. It also has some shops and a part-time internet café.
We originally intended to get out of Panamá City on Tuesday. But an invitation to drinks aboard S/V Batwing with our American friends Ron and Diane resulted not only in hangovers, but incomplete stowage as well. So we just put it off for another day. It was just as well. The weather has been strangely winter-like conditions. For those of our readers who are putting on the furnaces back in Frankfurt or Baltimore, winter here means the dry season, with steady drier winds, mainly NE Trades. At present, the Pacific is under the aegis of El Niño, meaning much less rainfall in Panamá and much more in Peru and Ecuador. For the last few days, however, we have been getting steady and acceptably strong S and SW winds, day and night. Instead of huge thunderheads in mid afternoon, the sky has been remaining azure blue with puffy clouds scudding by. Great sailing weather, especially for The Perlas. Batwing left on Tuesday without us and reported a great sail with reefs taken in their junk sails. What we didn’t find out until we met up with them a day later at Contadora was that halfway to the islands they ran into heavy squalls and blinding rainfall.
The dingy was already on the foredeck when dawn broke on Wednesday. We had lifted the two parts separately onto the boat on Tuesday, first scrubbing the barnacles and marine (-grade?) growth and then applying a new coat of hard bottom paint, waiting for it to dry and then nesting the second part aboard to do the same procedure. On Wednesday, it only needed to be strapped down tight for the voyage. The engine came to life (ahhh!) at 0630, purring away like a Harley Davison, and our own anchor chain was hauled aboard. Of course it was covered with the slimy mud common to the coast of Panamá City and it was only possible to get a grip on the chain by wearing fishermans gloves. On Tuesday, the day before, amongst our other preparatory activities, Josh of S/V Tropic Isle had come over to pick up his two series anchors, which we had inherited, so to speak, when a steel yacht had dragged down on us two months ago. We had been riding on them in addition to our own 45-pound Bruce anchor while we were without an engine. It took several hours to get those anchors untangled and hoisted into his dinghy. By the time we were finished, we were covered in slimy mud and looked like participants in a black-and-white minstrel show.
But now we were ready! The dirty anchor chain was left on deck to be cleaned in the sandy bottoms out in the islands. Up went the red main and staysails and we were off. Soon, we shut the engine down and even put up the yankee. We were doing over 5 knots with a slight heel to port. Glorious! It was so liberating finally to be shot of Panamá City!
The good sailing lasted for half of the distance before the breeze dropped in the face of a series of rainy squalls coming in from the SW. They seemed to take the breath right out of the air. At one point we simply hove to in order let one of these sheets of rain and dark cloud pass in front of us and then turned on the engine to complete the trip. It was important for us to test the engine work anyway, and to be sure that we were no longer going to be leaking huge amounts of engine oil into the bilge, the reason after all why we aborted out last departure for French Polynesia two months ago. The good news is that the new $4 rear oil seal is working and we are not loosing oil. The alternator was also putting out plenty of power into our new wiring system. There was no bad news.
We arrived at the anchorage off the north shore of Contadora Island about mid-afternoon. There was Batwing and the big catamaran, Sunbow (John and Sharon) and Lea Scotia (Trevor, Carissa and their three-year-old daughter, Kira from Seattle) already at anchor. We were promptly invited to a drink aboard Batwing. Oops! Here we go again.
It is so great to be out of the city and back in the islands. The weather is just about perfect. Yes, there was a heavy rainsquall in the early morning hours yesterday. But otherwise temperatures are staying around 30 degrees Celsius, blue skies and puffy clouds. Kathy has a lot of proofreading to do and the Iridium signal is a bit spotty. But Lea Scotia is getting internet right on aboard their yacht and Trevor is a proofreader too, now. Kathy has been going over there to send and receive and this afternoon, now that Lea Scotia and Batwing and Sunbow have all left, we shall row ashore to inspect the island and visit the internet café. We hope the Iridium signal will be better when we move to another island or to the other side of Contadora.
There are still relatively few boats here. Soon, however, other yachts will be riding the strong SE Trades up from Ecuador for the winter sailing season and yachts will be coming down from Central America or through the Canal from the Eastern Seaboard or from Europe. For the moment we are just a few of us here and we are content. From the cockpit where I was drinking my morning coffee, I spotted about six or seven whales carryinbg on a great acrobatic show about a mile away. Underneath us reef fish in their thousands were providing another type of water show. I can live with this!
posted by rjb @ Friday, October 23, 2009
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