Oct 9, 2011

Our homemade fuse!
The old fuse!
Belhaven did not want us to leave. We were motoring out this morning and our generator shut off. (We have a diesel electric boat, we run our generator to power our battery bank which our motors run off of. Without the generator we only have about an hour of battery life to run the motors.) Thankfully, we weren't past the breakwater yet and we just turned around and anchored. We had had some overheating issues with our generator last year which turned out to be seaweed in the elbow bend of our stopcock, this was not the problem we were having.
It seemed to be completely electrical. When Chris inspected the generator we had a blown fuse. Of course we didn't have that fuse as a spare part, and it was Sunday so nothing in Belhaven was open. Not that they would have had that part anyway. Chris traced the problem back to a power wire that had shorted to the generator. Once we insulated that, we had to make our own fuse! We had to solder wires on to a fuse that we had, and amazingly it worked! I am always amazed at how much he knows, and what he is capable of. The total time of this hold up was only 2 hrs, which wasn't as bad as it could have been.
We weren't able to make it to Beaufort as we had planned, but we got to Oriental which is only 20 miles away. They have a free dock at Oriental that is 55ft long with both sides available. There was a catamaran on one side of the dock, and a small sailboat on the opposite side. We thought there might be a chance that we could squeeze in too. The folks on the catamaran helped us get tied up. It was kind of like being a size 12 trying to fit into a size 2 jeans. We were in, but a considerable portion of our back side was hanging off the dock! It wasn't ideal for the long term, but we were secure for the night, and it was nice to walk around a bit after we had dinner.