Bottom Harbour Rose Island Bahamas

It had been a very busy pitstop in Nassau and, in a bit of a rush, we slipped our lines at 1115hrs on Friday 5^thApril to avoid the midday deadline.  If we had delayed beyond that time, the marina could have charged us another full day of mooring fees even if we’d spent just a few extra hours in situ before moving on.

As a result, BV was a bit in chaos. We’d stripped the bunks for doing the laundry but hadn’t remade them, plus we’d not stored everything as we normally do in the aft cabin.  Additionally, now that I’d got some parts, I wanted to work on the generator fuel supply line to see if we could fit the new low pressure pump and get rid of the air leak that we thought was causing the generator to run down and stop.

We needed a day or 2 at anchor and Bottom Harbour on Rose Island was screaming out to us as a logical place. Close, sheltered enough and with good communications so that we could look up anything that we needed to on the internet.  Further south in the Exumas the mobile phone coverage is very patchy which would not have been good for sending the follow up emails after Nicky’s trip to the solicitors. We also wanted to talk to Charlotte and wish her well because she had an important job interview coming up.

We might already have visited twice before, but Bottom Harbour on Rose Island became our destination and we dropped anchor there at 1245 hrs.

To work on the fuel lines and fit the low pressure fuel pump, we removed the saloon table and lifted the floorboards. That kept me busy whilst Nicky wrote some emails.  Mid-afternoon our industry was interrupted by the Bahamian Defence Force.  They had turned up in the anchorage in a small launch and wanted to carry out a full inspection of our boat (and others in the anchorage) as part of their routine checks.  They questioned us about where we had been, checked that our paperwork and permits were in order, and then rifled through a few lockers down below. Having the saloon table removed and floorboards raised didn’t make life easy for them but they were very polite and completed the checks that they needed to without any dramas.  Happy that everything was in order, they left us alone and continued on their patrol.

I spent the rest of the afternoon finishing working on the fuel lines and rebuilding the saloon whilst Nicky tidied up the rest of the boat. With everything back in place we fired up the generator and it ran well for an hour - hurrah!  To celebrate we made homemade pizza for dinner and picked out a nice bottle of wine, both of which we enjoyed whilst sitting in the cockpit and looking out over the peaceful anchorage.

Our homemade pizza - the only photo I took during this visit to Bottom Harbour

In the morning, after a very busy few days, we decided we’d take life at a slower pace.  So we spent the morning pottering about with a final few bits of tidying up and working on some blog pictures and emails.  There was some space in the water tanks to fill and I wanted to run the immersion heater make a tank of hot water, so we ran up our newly fixed generator again to check it worked under higher loads.  Sadly, it was back to its game of faltering, half running down and then, ultimately, stopping.

The plan for an afternoon of blog writing was shelved and we switched to fault diagnosis again. After lots of careful examining and pumping fuel through the pipes, despite the work of the previous day, it seemed that a small amount of air was still getting into the fuel supply line and collecting in the water separator.  Several weeks before we’d changed the fuel filters on the generator. Perhaps we had not seated the seals properly when we had put those assemblies back together and that was where the air was getting in?  It was strange because the generator is supposed to be self-bleeding to an extent and we really didn’t have a great deal of air in the system.  However, it seemed to be the logical source of our problems, so I took the fuel filter and water separator assembly apart (a very messy job) and put new seals in on either side of the filter. Unfortunately, despite the time, effort and diesel mess, another run of the generator proved that those seals were not the source of the problem.  The final potentially suspect connection in the fuel line was hidden under the floorboards and saloon table [Ed: inevitably!!].  Because we’d filled up in Nassau, fuel had leaked out of that joint from the full main tank when I’d undone that connection to fit the new pump the previous day.  That had complicated refitting the connection and we had been unable to get a new olive on the tank pipe or a satisfactory application of sealant.  We decided to defer working on that joint again until we had used some diesel from the main tank.

It was frustrating but we had a plan. I thought that I’d try just one more bleed of the fuel system and a run of the generator before we put everything back in the generator space, just in case we could get rid of the last air bubbles, but that proved to be a wildly over-optimistic outlook.  Not only did the small group of air bubbles remain, but this time the engine shut down with warning lights illuminated on the panel.

After another hour of tests and checks our conclusion was that the exhaust overheat warning sensor might have failed.  I was also very suspicious of the fuel shut-off solenoid because if that failed or faltered it could cause the generator to shut down.

What a depressing day.  We had thought that we had had a solution to the generator’s problems but it turned out that we now had multiple issues.  In fact, things were going backwards because now the generator wouldn’t even fire up.  What had started as a time-consuming but relatively simple to fix fuel supply problem, now included a wiring diagram and logic circuit headache and we had no significant information on either of these.  It was time for some e-mails to Fischer Panda to get some proper detailed advice on their wiring and safety shut-down logic circuitry.

Our evening meal as a subdued affair but we took the time to start discussing our options for the next few days. However, to complicate things further, the short to medium term forecast was for a 15knot wind coming from exactly the direction that we wanted to head towards.  All in all, a pretty frustrating day!

Bottom Harbour, Rose Island, Bahamas