Gassed like a Badger

The night before last the Generator stopped itself after 5 minutes.

This is very irritating, mostly because after many truly unpleasant hours yesterday I thought I had it licked. We thought it was spitting water out of the pipe underneath. After hours of trying to get it out I gave up and by passed it using 2 gas fittings and the pipe that feeds water to the deck wash pump on the foredeck.

 
Old photo, generator is the white thing.

The disappoint when it fired and water and exhaust fumes appeared under the engine was dreadful. The good news is engine charge system is working now. At 60% we may be able to up this, the freezer is off to save power. I liked the generator it gave me lots of 220v for my gadgets. Principally this PC.

Obviously my laptop was completely flat at the time....

 We're seriously worried by the generator, and still haven't identified the problem. The manual is detailed well written and has numerous illustration. That wasn't a typo. It has one picture of one side of the generator which it uses repeatedly.

All the cooling system is the other side of the generator, flat against a wall and completely inaccessible, so we can't see it or look at a picture of it. Yay!

I'm really disappointed at the moment. Normally I can fix anything. The water maker was eventually fixed but it took forever. Miss Tippy's laptop, forgotten password. Damn windows home has disabled the built in Administrator account so no joy. Spirit of Nina's laptop is French, they are  not. No I couldn't get it into English. Basque or Catalan yes. English no.

Normally I'd do a re-install  but you can't do that on third world internet. Even if the laptop manufacture did a proper job with they're website - which few do, bloated modern drivers and obfuscation utilities mean a re-install of windows from scratch requires several internet hours + time to download hundreds of meg.

I got heat stroke yesterday, down the bottom of the boat warm engine, warm water tank, warm everything. Lying in a pool of warm bilge water. Wrestling with rusty jubilee clips. No to mention being gassed by exhaust fumes. I ended up sick faint and with a stinking headache. I deserved to fix it. Had to eat a bowl of pretzels and put loads of salt all over my dinner for fear or what I'd done to my salt levels. You could have rung a pint of sweat from my boxers, let alone my t-shirt.

Damn I'm frustrated,  a job well done is satisfying, please can I properly fix something, permanently and well? I usually can everything is conspiring to be difficult at the moment.

I'm hunched over the chart table with my laptop charging off the 12v, (heh heh nice backup toy this). Its uncomfortable, and since were not getting nearly as much off the engine as the generator into the batteries, and my laptop is no subtracted from the battery charge not a free by product of it. I'm going to have to back off on the re-rendering video for the iPod. as we've seen it eats power and slows the lap top charge.

Island Kea, really goes well in light winds. Since they went light we've been flying a Cruising Chute for days. Its gone well. Very well actually. Last blog I commented we ran faster than anyone one else in the fleet. Now without the Genny we're getting a push from the engine when we're charging off that. We've been noticed. Fia Tira and Lucy Alice were chatting about wind rigs and arrival times on the radio last night, and had a good chunk of conversation about us and our sudden catchup routine + apparent massive speed advantage. Makes us look good.

Wind is due to go up again tomorrow. Kite snuffer is tricky to say the least. We'll probably drop it and go white sail. I have never, ever, run a kite for 24 hours straight before, we've had this up for 4 days. Tempting fate.