Wednesday, November 3, 2010

A Lot Like Work

We've had a couple of days here on anchor devoted to the apparently default endeavor when cruising:  fixing your boat in exotic locations! Actually, Equinox is fine, but we have a couple of minor issues that we worked to resolve on Monday and Tuesday. The first is that our Bose media center control unit in the salon appears to have an issue. We keep losing audio and then the unit gives us the error message "Failed 802 - call Bose." After we called through, unfortunately, it's not a re-programming issue, but rather, a dead hard drive. Bose is very good about their customer service, so all we have to do is simply send the unit in for repairs, and they will fix it and return it for a flat rate fee within two weeks. We had to laugh at that, which rather confused the poor technician at Bose, until we explained that we're aboard a boat in the Bahamas. Yes, cruising does spice things up a bit! :) 

Entrance to the SCYC Bar and Restaurant
Thus, to "simply send in the unit for repairs", we went on island to the Isles General Store, where we were lucky enough to find a box suitable for packing up the unit. We then went back to the Staniel Cay Yacht Club to fill out the requisite form to fly the unit via Watermakers Air to Fort Lauderdale, where it  will then be shipped by UPS to Bose. I had to run back to the boat in the dinghy to make the requisite  copies of our cruising permit, (needed for some reason even though we aren't shipping anything back to us here, we were only shipping it out! Once repaired, we will have Bose send the unit back to our Florida address.) To accomplish the shipment off-island though, required a bit of a leap of faith, since we had to sign our lives away  -- or at least our cc information -- so that the unknown amount of appropriate shipping charges, weight tares, etc can be paid, once they are determined. Hopefully, the charges won't be too exorbitant, but with paperwork completed, we had done all we could do to arrange for shipment and left the package at the bar so it could be taken to the airstrip.

Ron at the entrance to Isles General Store, where we bought
a new jerry can for Eclipse and found the needed box for
shipping the dead Bose unit back to the States
With that endeavor completed (hopefully!) we then made arrangements to deal with our deck freezer. We've noticed it having to run more than usual to keep things frozen, and suspected it needs a charge of refrigerant. Ron had gotten the name of a local AC/Refrigeration guy by the name of McKenzie, and we called to coordinate getting him aboard Equinox to take a peek at it. This involved running our dinghy over to a nearby island, Fowl Cay, where he works, and bringing him back to the boat. The good news was that indeed, the freezer does need a charge of refrigerant, although McKenzie didn't have the right refrigerant for the unit with him. (Apparently there are several types; he had a tank of 404 with him, and we need 401...) But, no worries!! McKenzie was going to track down his canister of 401 by checking with a buddy of his who may have borrowed it. If his buddy didn't have it, McKenzie was going to arrange to have the appropriate stuff sent along on the next mail boat from Nassau. As they say, "soon come"... ! McKenzie assured us he will get back to us and things will be fine with the freezer, so we will be patient and wait.

It's not as if we're going anywhere in the meantime anyway, with the weather forecasts predicting Tropical Storm/Depression/Hurricane Tomas to make landfall to the south, across Haiti and the Dominican Republic. There is also a cold front coming down from the States that will bring in some rainy, blustery weather as well, so we plan to remain tucked in here at Staniel Cay. Our little anchorage here is pretty well situated with protection from several directions, between Staniel Cay to our east, the little islands to our west, and Big Major's Spot to the northwest, so hopefully we'll still be in a fairly good lee when the winds swing around the compass from east to south to the north again as the cold front moves through. We'll just keep an eye on things while we are hunkering down, and are hoping for better weather next week!

Despite all our errands, calls and dinghy runs, we did manage to get out to do some fun lobstering in the late afternoon yesterday, so that was good. Although, by evening's end, I had to agree with Ron, who commented that all our running around the past couple of days felt a lot like... work! :)


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