Wednesday, March 12, 2025 — We were up again early to get the boat ready to go to sea. A storm was coming in the next few days. As much as we liked this place, we’d had to make a decision between staying here longer than planned or leaving sooner than planned. We opted for sooner. We picked an anchorage ten hours away so we could do a day run. 

We quickly got the dinghy up and all the loose things stowed. As soon as dawn broke (shortly before 0700), Eric turned on the engine. The stabilizers didn’t turn on. Eric troubleshooted and determined that the servo controller (main computer) was getting power.

Our new friends also decided to move on for the storm. Here they were leaving the anchorage as the sun rose.

It was now 0745. If we were going to make it before dark, we didn’t have time to continue to troubleshoot. Eric decided to leave anyways and run without stabilizers. The reality was that we were going to be in head seas for this passage, and the stabilizers don’t really help in those conditions, anyways. 

We are pleased to report that the seas not bad: two-foot swells with 1 foot wind chop, both at long wave periods, so Eric wasn’t sick. It was a sunny day with scattered clouds. We followed the shore of Long Island all the way to the northern tip, then rounded the corner and entered an anchorage called Calabash, on the northeastern tip of the island.

We anchored in only 7 feet of water, and it was so clear that we could see the anchor below us. We were also happy to see that, thanks to the waves being small, not much salt had accumulated onboard. Yay!

The wind was forecast to change directions tonight — in fact, it had already started to shift. Once the wind fully shifted and the waves followed suit, the anchorage would be pleasant. However, Initially, for the here and now, it was really rolly — worse than being at sea! Eric decided to put one of the flopper stoppers out. He shortened the chain to half its normal length, and when he deployed it, it hit the bottom. Argh.

We got the dinghy down and Eric went out in dinghy to shorten the chain length some more. Once it was adjusted, the flopper stopper helped with the motion, but it was still uncomfortable. Eric assured us that once the waves changed directions, it would be calm.

Once we were situated, Eric went back to work on stabilizers. He contacted ABT to verify how to go about properly troubleshooting. When he took the cover off the servo control box, he saw that all the fuses except one had lights that turned red when the fuse burnt out. None of the lights were red. Eric took out the one fuse that didn’t have a light, which was a cylindrical glass fuse. It didn’t look broken, but Eric changed it anyway (the stabilizers came with a bag of spare fuses). Eric powered the unit on, and everything worked properly. ABT agrees with Eric’s theory that the fuse had likely been weakened by the ARCO Zeus over-voltage failure. 

It was another beautiful sunset.

The full moon was bright in the sky in the twilight,

After dark, the full moon was so bright that where the moonbeams fell, it was like daylight outside. We could even see the bottom underneath us in the moonlight!