Jeff just arrived yesterday in Costa Rica to check on my boat. His initial report is that the boat is clean and looks good. He will be taking it out for a spin today, to verify all is running well. The latest word from the shipping company is that a freighter will pick it up on Sept 6th.
On a different subject…
I notice that on one of the boards I follow http://groups.yahoo.com/group/world-cruising/), the hottest topic I’ve seen recently regards the existence of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Allegedly it’s a large pile of trash floating out in the center of the Pacific, and consists of all the trash we’ve thrown in the ocean floating together in the center of the Pacific. I’m a skeptic, and find the size estimates “unlikely”. For instance, on Wikipedia, it’s size is estimated as:
The size of the affected region is unknown, but estimates range from 700,000 km2 to more than 15 million km2 – greater than twice the size of the continental US.
Other estimates are less grand, but still big. For instance, several sites estimate the size as being roughly the size of Texas.
I do suspect that there are pockets of floating trash in the Pacific, but I sincerely hope they are not anywhere near that big. I’m not sure I carry enough fuel to side step something that is twice the size of the Continental US, while crossing the Pacific. I’m not too worried… My guess is that if anything that big were out there, it would show on Google Earth.
-Ken W
2 Responses
Thanks for the tip. Did you see the picture of my bow thruster from when I hauled the boat out? It was totally packed with crud. It’s amazing it was working. The stern thruster on my boat is impossible to clean. We just had a diver under the boat yesterday to clean the bottom.
In your case, I would have been totally confused, and would have suspected an electrical problem. I guess the shore power was able to over power all the clogging, but the batteries could not. Bizarre. I’m glad you finally figured it out.
Whenever a diver is under my boat the stern thruster tube fills with air, and the thruster is useless. At first I thought my thruster had failed. It would die immediately whenever I’d try to use it. Finally I discovered that if I just keep repeatedly goosing it I can flush the air out.
Boats are never boring!
-Ken W
Ken, regarding warm water and not using the boat. I just spent two weeks chasing a poorly operating 8hp Bow Thruster on Nordhavn 4061. When hooked up to dock side power the thruster appeared to be near full power but when crusing it was useless. Ended up checking everything from batteries to the unit itself until we had the diver check things out below. it turned out that he was not cleaning the tunnel and prop thus allowing for a lot of stuff to grow throughout. After a quick cleaning everything is back to normal.