The day starts really well with a lovely 1.2km morning swim along the coral reef and a quick visit to “Happy Island”. My comment on Strava: “Beats the pool any time!”
Soon after breakfast as I get ready to leave, a local fisherman stops by and offers me a nice size grouper, “just caught it 20min ago”. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I need a Caribbean turkey, so I bite and he is nice enough to descale and filet it for me.
I want to head up to Tobago Cays and it is a lovely day for the short upwind sail. So I get JACE ready and start the engine and start weighing anchor. This is where this day takes a turn for the worse.
“Not another technical problem?”, you will say. Yes, exactly, those were my words too. Well, I might have thrown in an expletive or two. Today, it is the anchor winch, or windlass, as it is called.
Anchors are heave and even more so is the anchor chain. The big electric windlass is thus a crucial piece of kit. And as I stand there pulling up the anchor today, I hear it grinding slower and slower. I help it out by driving the boat forward to take all strain off the chain. But even just the weight of the anchor and chain overpowers the windlass and it stops.
That leaves me in quite a pickle as the anchor is no longer holding me and there are boats downwind from me that I am drifting towards. At the same time 100lbs of anchor and chain hanging off the bow and dragging on the seabed makes JACE hard to maneuver and I can’t exactly sail away like that. What to do? Well, brute force!
I grab a winch handle and start winching up all the weight by hand. It is hard work and slow going. JACE drifts further aft and I start using my bare hands pulling up the chain frantically. Thankfully, it is a shallow anchorage and not too much chain to pull in. I manage to pull up the anchor just in time, sprint to the helm, and put her in gear and motor out of danger and the anchorage. Wow, that was close!
While the imminent danger has been averted, I am not out of trouble. Because without a windlass you can’t anchor and that severely limits my options and is ultimately a safety concern. So I put the autopilot on and JACE in slow speed and start troubleshooting. Again!
The windlass (and also the bow thruster) are powered by a big auxiliary battery up front under the forward berth. My suspicion from the way the windlass died slowly is that this battery is bad. I grab my multimeter and measure its voltage. Sure enough, at just about 12.0V it is fairly depleted. This is still the old kind of “car battery”, not the new lithium ion type we now use to power the boat. My further suspicion is that as part of the electrical refit, the charging circuit of that forward battery got broken. I measure the amps running to the battery (while the engine is on) and it is zero. I crank up the generator and still the charging current is zero. Solar is on, house batteries are full, engine and generator on and – nothing. Suspicion confirmed.
I turn around and go back to the anchorage and this time grab a mooring to tie up to. Now I can focus on fixing this. I call Aaron, my marine electrician turned friend, and for the next two hours we talk, text, send images as we step by step analyze the problem. It is very educational for me to see how methodical a pro like him approaches this. We open the nearly 20yr-old electric switch box that is upfront with the battery. It is chaos in there, none of the wires are labeled and I worry this is where the problem will be.
I spare you the details. In the end it is a new component between the new lithium ion house bank and the forward battery that for some reasons wasn’t letting the charging current through. It’s an easy fix and, bam, there are over 60 amps flowing forward to replenish the battery. “By this evening it will be back in business”, says Aaron. In the late afternoon, I test the windlass and, alas, it is back to full strength and I am ready to head out again. Tomorrow. By now it is too late. Lost a day but learned a ton and grew a little more confident.