2023-03-26 Lindsey's visit - watermaker out again

Our niece Lindsey flew into Staniel Cay on Monday the 20th in the late afternoon/evening, after a couple of delays in her flight.   We got back to the boat, upped anchor and moved to Big Majors, as winds were clocking and becoming strong out of the NE.    

Next morning, we made her suffer through 4 hours of motoring in to strong NE winds and seas, to get up to Waderick Wells.   Now normally we would not do this, but we had to be in Nassau by Friday night, so we did the cruiser unthinkable - we made a schedule.  Fortunately, that was the only unpleasant 4 hours of the next week - so not bad at all.

We went for a couple of nice walks on Waderick, and a great snorkel where we saw lots of fish, and a group of 3 large spotted eagle rays.  The rays were a good 5 feet across and had tails that were 3 to 4 feet  long.  Spent 10-15 minutes watching and following them, very impressive.  Unfortunately, forgot the underwater camera, so you will have to take our word on it.

Our niece Lindsey - beautiful girl, and beautiful water at Waderick Wells

Lots of un-afraid curly tailed lizards that posed for us on the walks

Cool cavern we found on one walk, much cooler down at the bottom

Explored some ruins

Lindsey has a great sense of humor, and is fun to hang with

Exploring sound side beach and shore

After two days Waderick Wells, we had a very nice sail up to Shroud Cay, and went exploring in the mangrove river and sound side beach.  

Sound side beach - nice sand

Saw several turtles in the mangroves

Also saw this pink flamingo - off a large luxury yacht travelling the mangrove river

Lindsey went for a kayak trip, and saw this nice ray

She also saw this shark, in fairly shallow water as well.

After Shroud Cay, it was time to head to Nassau, so she could join her dive boat, where she will spend just short of a week diving around the Bahamas.    We had a nice sail, even got to use the Spinnaker for a while.

We went for a nice walk in Nassau, visited the Queens staircase (Queens staircase history) and had a nice dinner out.

Found the Queens staircase.

We did it the easy way, and walked down the steps

Ate at the "Bahamian Bistro" - was recommended to us by a local we stopped on the street.  Turns out, this is where we ate last year when Lindsey visited.  Food still good, and neat atmosphere.

Nassau is not our favorite spot, but it does have good grocery stores and is one of the best spots to go if you need parts or repair.  It also has good boat watching - and we are always amazed by the cruise ships.  6 of them in on Saturday.

We figure these 6 cruise ships brought in around over 18,000 people to Nassau in one day.  That's a population increase of 5.7% in one day.

We tried to run out watermaker on the sail into Nassau and it worked for about 3 hours, then just stopped, with an odd smell, - not quite burning, but warm electrical.   After taking Lindsey to her dive boat, we returned to Charm, and got to work on taking the watermaker motor apart.

  

Salon table is now our workshop

Got the innards out, and found lots of loose graphite and some commutator wear.

Dean cleaned all the parts out getting ready for re-assembly

The innards look OK after cleaning, and polishing the commutator.  So we put it back together, but will head into town on Monday, and see if we can find new brushes before trying to run it again, as one of our brushes is still "jury rigged" back together.

If we can't keep the watermaker going, it may mean heading back to the states about a month earlier than planned.  We have been getting a couple of runs out of a jury rigged brush, but each time we do this the brush repair gets harder - and we don't think we will be able to run the watermaker 12 more runs which is what it will take before we get back to the states if we stay until mid-may as planned.