Batteries.

Brrr! It's still chilly here and the blankets are sitting ready on the bed for night time...

One excellent piece of news for the New Year is that our attempts to revive our ailing batteries have been very successful. We did a lot of research on the internet and found quite a lot of reference to the fact that batteries like to play 'possum' when you try and recharge them from a low voltage. So we persevered and continued to belt them through our three step smart charger. This was a bit scary at times as we had to disconnect the heat sensor of the thing kept cutting out in the tropical temperatures. What was interesting was that when we called the charger manufacturer (Victron) for advice they said that the charger wasn't powerful enough for use in the Tropics! Nobody said a word about that when we were outfitting for bluewater sailing...

Still we used other info and kept at it. The final clincher was when we isolated two out of the four house batteries and concentrated on those. Finally we got the specific gravity measurements up to 1.27 and hoped all was well. So a month later the batteries are performing at the correct level again and between the wind generator and the engine we have been able to keep them happily charged.

It would have been so easy to just replace them, except we couldn't get the one's we wanted here! Makes you think about how often we just replace stuff that could probably be re-generated without too much hassle.

TBH has installed the new navigation lights, fore and aft. After the expensive LED ones blowing in the lightning strike we have gone back to the good old fashioned basic model, one that you can at least change the light bulb on!

So we have another list as long as our arm of maintenance to do, some urgent, other not so vital and intend to spend the next month kicking it into touch...I do so love good intentions don't you.