Saturday, June 30, 2012

     When that storm hit me the other day, in Norfolk Harbor, some rain got onto my navigation table, and also onto my iGO DC to DC converter and wiped it out. This is what I use to power up my Navigation Laptop. I like it because it is a very efficient and as a result takes minimal power from my house battery. Now in place of it I have to use an inverter, which is plugged into a 12 VDC outlet, and then my laptops charger is plugged into that. The problem with this setup is, if you are concerned with battery usage, is that both of these devices, the inverter and the charger, become heater blocks and therefore rob your house battery of lots of amp hours. You can see that by just picking these items up. They get very hot. I think that the reason that these two devices get so hot is that first: The inverter, which is not that expensive,  puts out a crummy sine wave, and in the process heats itself up, and second: the laptops charger now has to work with this crummy pseudo sine wave in order to  get it's regulated 12 VDC out of it. Now you might ask "why don't you just plug the laptop directly into the boat's 12 VDC supply?". It would be great if you could do that, but the problem is that the boat's DC supply is not regulated, and as a result when the engine is running, the voltages can get pretty high and as a result damage electronic equipment.
    So now I am on my way to Ocean City, MD. The Chesapeake Bay is very calm, almost motionless except for the passing power boats, and some swells coming in from the South. No ships today because of the weekend. It takes about 6 to 7 hours to get around Cape Charles. That's what you get when you are only moving around 5 knots. Going up the coast, it was again very calm. Now as I am going along I notice  a big storm cloud over the mainland. The cloud was pretty thick so that as the Sun was beginning to set I noticed that at first I lost sight of it at about 30 degrees above the horizon, and then saw it again about 5 degrees  In time as it started to get darker I could see lightening from the cloud to the mainland. As I am moving along all of a sudden I get a weather alert ( I finally figured how to set up my radio), and I say to myself  "Isn't this great, the radio is going to warn me about the storm cloud over the mainland". Instead it starts broadcasting about a tornado on the ground in Virginia.  I am in Maryland, but the first thing that comes to my mind is that I wonder if the storm that I am looking at could also spawn a tornado? And,  if it did, what would I do. Go below and duck under a table?

   So anyway I continued on watching the storm and listening to the weather. In time I notice a light on my instrument panel indicating an electrical problem. It seemed that maybe the alternator stopped working. I go down below and open the engine compartment to see if the alternator belt was still intact. It was. Right now it's dark, and I am getting tired. So I decide that I will wait and  troubleshoot this problem in the morning. Meanwhile I realize that I could lose my battery power during the night. So I decide to start shutting down some electronics, and some lights. I shut off my steaming light. I shut down my Navigation laptop, and BTW the inverter and charger are extremely hot. I shut off the refrigerator. The only things that I leave on are my running lights, my small Garmin GPS, my radar, and my autopilot. Now the autopilot uses a lot of power, so I only kept it in standby, and will only use it if I have to leave the helm. Now I also start recording my GPS positions every hour, so in case my instruments shut down completely I can dead reckon from my last position.
   So I go through the night like this doing the steering, and just hoping that daylight comes quickly. I arrive at Ocean City, MD around 9 AM. I go through the inlet. I make a quick left and follow the buoys a short distance and drop the anchor. I have to say that by this time I could not just go to sleep. I am so over tired, and I just can't. It took me about a half day to straighten myself out.