Heading for Socorro Island, then Hawaii

This week of March 20th, 2013, I'm doing the final preparations for leaving on a single handed sail to Hawaii. I've spent the winter here in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle getting the boat ready for some blue water sailing. New standing rigging, 2 new 185 watt solar panels on a new arch hooked up to a Blue Sky 3024i controller, the water maker is working like a champ after laying dormant for FIVE (5) years without being run or re-pickled. Everybody was betting money I had ruined the membranes through five years of criminal neglect, but I got lucky. It hasn't really been needed in Mexico, as Freyja carries over 100 gallons in two 50 g. tanks and it seems to last for a month or so. You can buy 20 5 gallon bottles of distilled water for maybe 18 to 20 pesos a bottle, or pull into a marina for a few days of some town fun and stock up on water, too. The plan is to leave around April Fool's Day in a two boat convoy with Double Diamond, a Lagoon 44, crewed by my pals Jeff and Melody. They're heading for the S. Pacific, but we're both shaping an initial course to Socorro Island where we plan to hang out for a day or three. Maybe we'll have a few other boats with us, we'll see. Lots of Puddle Jumpers are waiting in Banderas Bay for a weather window - the gurus are suggesting waiting for a week or so as a fairly large and intense 995 low pressure event is taking place almost right on top of Hawaii and throwing off weather all over the eastern Pacific. There are a lot of big mean waves heading south and east from the area of Hawaii, so my not being ready to go for a week or so is working out. I'm trying to figure out how much chocolate to bring. I need more coffee beans, some beer, peanut butter, tortillas (we bought 40 packs of 10 for our trip to the Marquesas, for 3 guys. We didn't eat them all and they were still good several months after we bought them, according to Emil!) Another food I'm going to try is sprouted beans, like garbanzos, lentils, pintos, etc. Supposedly sprouting converts the starch to protein or something, plus they are good for salads and stuff. Oh, yeah, a bunch of fruit and veges. And 5 or 6 dozen eggs. Cheese seems to last really well on ocean voyages. Canned tuna lasts pretty well. Tequila and rum, they don't seem to last as long. Granola. Boxes of soy milk last forever. Boxes of fruit juice so I don't get scurvy and so the rum tastes better. Apples. Oranges. Half and half for the coffee, enough to freeze some, as it will churn to butter if there is much wave action, so better to freeze so small containers of it. Jamaica, fresh dried, for sun tea. A nice cigar for the half way point, or as soon thereafter as the weather is right. Maybe some other stuff, too. Costco raw chicken thighs in those packs they sell, to freeze. I'm not going to be baking bread or making brownies. I'm thinking more of a sort of bachelor diet for this trip. Maybe a couple of those Costco frozen lasagnas or similar stuff, cut up into ziplock bags and frozen into meal size packs! just thought of that last one. Hmmm. Frozen apple pie chunks? Frozen french bread chunks? (I do have a large freezer and those huge solar panels to power it!). And now that I'm thinking frozen - Ta Dahhh! Ice cream! More later. (Not sure why my paragraphs aren't separated in the final post.)

Well, today was a very good day. I fired up Freyja at around 8:30 this morning and headed out into Banderas Bay to run my PUR PowerSurvivor 80 II (nka Katadyn) [MROD 80-II-2 (Modular)] water maker for the first time in the 5 years that I’ve owned the boat. For a week or two (not full time :) ) I'd been studying the manual and opening the compartment with all the machinery and plumbing and trying to decipher the hoses and valves. So I was ready. All the pundits and spectators on the dock (including, actually, me myself) were very skeptical about it working after its being criminally ignored for at least 5 years. The two membranes that the high pressure pump pushes the water through on this PUR Powersurvivor 80 II cost almost $400 each, and might have been ruined by being ignored for so long. You are supposed to run biocide through them (called pickling) every so often, but opinions differ on how often. I found the big guru wise man of my kind of water maker, Gary Albers, who had posted the book he wrote about them on the internet. He seemed to say that with an initial proper pickling they should last “for years” if no new water was introduced into them, though he did recommend more frequent pickling than ever 5 years. With my fingers crossed, after I was a mile out into the Bay, away from any oil or chemical pollution, I turned it on. The first test was, of course, whether it would even turn on! It did. Test #2 was whether it would produce 3 gallons of water an hour. It did! An hour later, I had about 12 liters, which is close enough for water makers. The next test was to taste some of the last water out of it, so I put the hose into a glass and watched it start to fill with beautiful crystal clear reverse osmosis water. It smelled like, well, like nothing, it didn't smell! That was a good sign. And then, it tasted like really good pure fresh water. Hooray! So, for the final test, I went back to the dock and had a pal bring his electronic TDS meter over to test for total dissolved solids, including salt. The reading was 420, which is well within spec for a very healthy couple of $400 apiece water maker membranes! Another hooray! According to the guru, I should get at least another couple of years of use out of them, if I use them properly, and apparently longer if I pickle them. Life is also good on another front. Since getting my two 185 watt Kyocera solar panels hooked up to my Blue Sky 3024i Controller I haven't had to plug into the shore power now for maybe 3 weeks. The batteries are full at the end of each charging day (about 5 pm when the sun gets so low that the panels go to sleep). I was seeing 23.7 amps today because I was running the inverter to run the vacuum cleaner to blow the water out of Bill's TDS meter that I sorta accidentally got water inside of assuming, natch, that it would be water proof. That is a lot of power! I’m averaging making about 90 to 105 amps a day. I’m making ice and keeping my big old original Passport 40 refrigerator and freezer as cold as I want to. The lights are mostly LED now, both inside and outside the boat, so they don’t use much power. I’m charging computers, watching movies, etc. The days have been pretty sunny or totally sunny, so I’ll see what happens with cloud cover, and also with the autopilot going 24/7, and various nav instruments and radar being used on and off day and night for a few weeks. I might have to motor a bit to charge the batteries, but I’m hoping not! The state of the art Blue Sky 3024i MPPT charge controller really can do some magic to the high voltage the panels are putting out. The emptier the batteries, the more amps it cranks out. So, today I'm happy with my water maker Fool's Luck!