George Town Bahamas 2

Sea Wind at anchor off George Town

On the Monday (15 April) we took the dinghy ashore to run a number of errands.  The most important of these was to visit the immigration office to get our visas extended, but we also needed to leave a propane bottle at one of the stores for refilling.

The dinghy dock at George Town. It’s a good-sized dock and, usefully, has a fresh water tap part way down it (alongside the water bottles in the photo above)

George Town is a pleasant little town with some good facilities for cruisers including an excellent, well-protected dinghy dock with a freely accessible water supply; reasonable food shopping; a convenient dive shop; a laundry; a couple of places where one can arrange to have propane bottles refilled; good comms links by sea and air with other islands and the USA; and a Bahamas customs and immigration office. The latter is a 5-10 minute walk from the dinghy dock, quite close to the laundry, and the officers are quite used to providing visa extensions to visitors who need them.  Visa extensions are only done in the morning but the process is quite quick and surprisingly painless though, according to the rules, you can only apply for a visa extension within about a week of your visa expiry date.

George Town view

Extensions granted, Nicky negotiated with the laundry for a couple of loads to go through the machines and I returned to BV to work on the electrical circuits on the generator.  Fischer Panda had been very efficient at arranging for the spare parts that we wanted to be sent to our home address but our request for advice from the technical team had gone unanswered, despite repeated requests and nudges from the sales team.  But, looking closely at the limited information in the manual, plus with a bit of thinking, I had a theory on where the fault might be.  There seemed to be a key relay that, when energised, switched on the fuel valve, water cooling pump and nearly everything else significant on the generator to make it work.  If the fault sensors detected a fault (or failed) they switched this relay off.  A faulty relay would shut down the engine and might be the cause of our issues but it would have to be an intermittent fault. I was also slightly puzzled that if this relay was working, why was the cooling pump not running?  Time for some more testing.

George Town view

Anchorage off George Town.  Restless is the nearest yacht to us with Sea Wind the next one further back

Amazingly, my work on the generator was successful.  The relays tested out as functioning correctly and the cooling pump worked but wasn’t getting any power.  It was looking like a wiring loom problem but checking that carefully showed up no obvious problems until I wiggled the wires where they went into the main connection box. Ta-dah!  The cooling pump and relay chattered on and off.  I’d finally found the main source of our intermittent faults!  Pushing all of the connections together properly did the trick and the generator started first time and ran for over an hour whilst under high load, running the water-maker [Ed: so much for our morning’s water run to and from the dinghy dock!].  What a relief to have finally solved the mystery generator problem.

Good times.  Crews of Blue Velvet of Sark, Sea Wind and Restless aboard Sea Wind enjoying drinks and Susanne’s fabulous focaccia

In the evening we celebrated our success with Lars and Susanne and the crew of Restless.  It was one of several get-togethers that we had over the time that we spent in George Town but we were so lax in taking photos that the picture above (c/o Susanne) is the only one we have of all of us together.

George Town, Bahamas