Things I learned at Hiva Oa

We have been very active since arriving in Hiva Oa – both working on the boat (again) and visiting the town and island. I wanted to get a quick update out as we plan to leave this morning for Fatu Hiva and wanted people to know the rough plan.

When we leave this morining it will be a short 7 hours sail to Fatu Hiva – so no night watch required, then back up to Tahuata which I can see from here as I type this blog – so two nice daysails. From there it may be a night sail to arrive at Nuku Hiva (or possibly one of the other neighbours). Nuku Hiva will be the last port of call before leaving the Marquesas for the archipelago/coral islands of the Tuamodos.

We have discontinued PredictWind IridiumGo so, although the dot will be updated showing our position, it may not be as frequent (paying $150USD/month for the semi-automated dot was not deemed a good use of cash). With the Starlink we will remain in touch throughout.

We had a great day yesterday with a car rental and visiting some archaeological sites (Sharon will post a update), but I wanted to share some practical insights about big red balls, loose nuts and other issues.

When at anchor here, sometimes the wind blows and boats mostly line up – but often it is dead calm and the boats are pointed every which way. This can be dangerous as although you might clock around your anchor chain, the stern ends of 2 boats can meet. Little did I know that Bill had some big red fenders for just this eventuality.

Probably one of the big breakthroughs was when Bill woke up early one morning (6am) and discovered he had loose nuts. He was tossing and turning dreaming of electrical connections and hot wires – jumped out of bed and went to work. There was a red wire (primary cable to the batteries) from the inverter charger that was noticeably hot to the touch. He was going to bypass the fuse there as he thought it might be causing the voltage drop we had been witnessing. Bottom line is that he discovered the big nuts holding it in place were already loose and tightened them up.

This may not sound like much, but as Ken would observe, loose nuts are not a great thing in electrical systems. The impact was suddenly the fridge was working properly (we have ice again), when we ran the generator we got more charge into the batteries, the induction stove worked properly and more. Yahoo!

You may recall we had made the decision not to try and take on the CZone while at sea but to wait until we were safely at anchor. This was a good decision it turned out. I took on the CZone config which involved “firmware updates”. Needless to say the process did not work as advertised and the entire system took a holiday – no electrical, no wifi etc. Luckily my phone and a cell connection allowed some continued access to the internet. After a number of hours and a more involved process all 8 CZone “mini-brains” and the main display were all upgraded to the proper release. As we hoped, this allowed us to see into the “brains” of the inverter and we discovered a couple of configuration parameters that were not the best.

Bottom line is, between Bill’s tighter nuts and the new config, the generator and charger ran last night at 140ah into the batteries (2.2 kilowatts) continuously – no scale back. It simply rocked! We still need to figure out why the 5.5 kilowatt generator was at 90% load capacity at 2.2, but the batteries could not take any more charge any faster regardless. This is awesome.

Some other observations…

Monday is a holiday here and we decided that the wether window looks best for today (none bad, but today best) so we will be leaving in and hour for Fatu Hiva.

The adventure continues!