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Persistent Lady - Monday june 16, 2014



Monday June 16, 2014 The sun finally came out about 2:00, still cloudy but can feel the warmth on your skin. Very nice, and the solar panels will be charging. Light wind, under 10 knots, the grib file says to expect about 6 knots but based on observation, I would guess closer to 8, but variable in strength. We are making between 4 and 5.5 knots over the ground based on the GPS, but cannot sail the rhumb line so we are sailing a course about 30 degrees North of the line and are currently located about 10 miles North of it and 350 miles from Gibraltar. Because we are sailing higher than desired we will take longer to get there, but what else do we have to do? Not like we are missing out on the big sale at the mall or anything. When we start motoring we will just point our nose at Gibraltar and sail till we get there.

Having a strange issue with the fuel tanks. Sometimes we measure the fuel (insert the stick that is measured off to show ½, ¾, etc.) and we get a reading, then a day or so later we measure again and we get more fuel than the first time. We think we have figured it out, but will need to do some work to verify. We have two tanks of 90 gallons each and they are joined together by a 3/8 copper tube with a shut off at each tank so we can isolate them, if desired. The starboard tank is the one we use the stick on because we can unscrew the cap on top and measure directly. The port tank has an abandoned tank meter screwed down on the opening on top, but it is no longer used (evidently not used for a very long time). Jake and I managed to get the fitting off the port tank and pulled up the metering device as far as we could and it was terribly corroded; bits of corrosion kept falling off while we were examining it. We could not remove it, and do not have a screw on replacement cap if we did, so we dropped it back in place. Jake thinks the corrosion from the device has been flaking off over time and has settled at the opening of the copper tube that joins the two tanks. We draw off the starboard tank so it drops when we use it but the port tank is very slow to refill the starboard tank because of the plugged up tube. This makes sense, but we cannot be sure. When we measure the tanks at sea the fuel sloshes so we could be getting misleading readings from that. In the meantime we are conserving fuel because we are not 100% sure how much we have. No reading has indicated that we have less than 100 gallons, so I feel confident we have at least that much and if we motored at 5 knots in calm water we would use about ½ gallon per hour so we could probably motor the remaining 350 mile on about 35 gallons of fuel. The most we burn is 1 gallon per hour, so we would probably be safe if we ran at that rate, but I don’t like to run the tanks too low, so I always figure that we need to leave at least 10 gallons in the tank to avoid sucking up the corrosion and muck at the bottom of the tank. So 100 gallons less the 10 gallon reserve leaves 90 gallons at 1 gallon to ½ gallon per hour is somewhere between 90 hours of motoring to 180 hours, so we should be OK; but still conserving fuel. Since we are averaging 4 knots SOG but are only making good toward our goal a little less than that, we will continue sailing till we are making considerably less progress than that, probably sometime tomorrow.

I mentioned that we are planning a trip to Morocco from Gibraltar, but we cannot find out if we need a visa or not. We will take the ferry over and so I think we don’t need one. The 2014 Mediterranean Almanac says pass port and visa if required; not much help. Sherrin wants to buy some rugs for the boat and we all want to go to Casablanca but it is a little ways down the coast and not sure we want to spend 2 – 3 days to get there and back, but would like to go to the Casbah! (Rock the Casbah!, Rock the Casbah!) We will see.

I want to have a mechanic rewire the anchor windlass breaker in Gibraltar. It worked before Dave and I decided to use the anchor breaker to feed the sub-panel. I think we just forgot to hook the windlass back up, but I cannot find the correct wire. We figured the sub-panel only supports lights (tri-color, anchor, steaming, foredeck) which don’t draw much and the anchor windlass will not be used at the same time as the lights (may be used with the foredeck light) so it would be safe to jump the sub-panel off that breaker. I think it will be a quick fix. The anchor is heavy and the 200 feet of chain is very heavy, so I need all the help I can get.

We just tried the last cheese we bought in the Azores. It is a treat to try something like a cheese, not knowing what it will taste like, and discover that it is really good; wish we would have bought more of it! It should really dress up the stuffed peppers tonight! Now, if we just had another bottle of green wine to go with it!

We want to keep the Yellow-Brick transmitter and have talked to the ARC to see if we can just keep this one and send payment to Yellow-Brick but have not gotten an answer yet. If that does not work, we may not have a transmitter for a week or so, but plan on keeping that going as long as we cruise.

Better get busy with dinner, will send more tomorrow.


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