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.
Wednesday, March 5 — The weather forecast had changed for the worse, so we needed to either leave Jamaica sooner than planned or stay longer than planned. We opted for sooner, which meant we needed to get serious about boat projects and sightseeing.
After our morning routine of schoolwork and boat chores, Eric ran a bunch of tests to verify how the boat’s systems operate. After the voltage regulator problem he wanted to parallel in each of the battery banks to the house bank to make sure they each worked, which they did. He verified that the main engine shuts down without voltage from the house bank of batteries. He verified that if he shut the engine bank off, then shut off house bank, then the engine wouldn’t shut off. This confirmed his suspicion that the Seafire system was getting power from the engine bank in order to shut off the engine.
Ed had come by that morning and was being pushy about escorting us on a sightseeing trip. Knowing that we were running out of time, at 1500, we took him up on the offer. He said he was taking us to the Frenchman’s Cove and the Blue Lagoon. Ed walked us over to the gas station between the two main roads in town and we caught a taxi.
The taxi took the road that paralleled East Harbor. We headed southeast for about five miles. Shortly beyond East Harbor, the waterfront became all privately owned property. The buildings along the shore were mostly homes, with a few hotels, and was an interesting mix of old, new, small, large, low-end and high end.
This place is apparently a private home called Trident CastleThere were plenty of small homes, too. Continue reading →
Sunday, January 19 — We’d meant to set the alarm for 0300, but Christi screwed up and set it for 0200. She was able to reset it, roll over and go back to sleep, but Eric was up for the day. Which worked out okay, because our crew was also up at 0200 and texting Eric about their status.
The crew arrived at 0250. Eric let the crew in the marina gate. Christi got up at 0300 and immediately started making coffee. We did all the last things needed to get ready to take Kosmos to sea, and untied at 0400. Eric decided to run the generator and AC all day so that the fresh lake water would flush out any salt buildup in the units, as well as keeping it cooler inside.
Eric drove us to the rendezvous site between buoys 4 and 6, where we did a loop until we saw the pilot boat approaching us. The pilot boat pulled up along side us and a man jumped aboard. Then, much to our surprise, a second man jumped aboard, as well.
The first man introduced himself as Thaddeus, a trainee advisor, and other man as Amado, his trainer. Thaddeus (the trainee) was very serious; Amado (the trainer) was more relaxed.
We drove towards the first of the two Mira Flores locks. The last time we went through the canal, we’d had five line handlers – three highly experienced boaters and what we’d thought were two professional line handlers (we later found out that only one of them was an experienced canal line handler). Christi was the videographer. This time, Christi was line handling, and none of our crew were experienced. But based on our experience the last time, we felt the crew was trained well enough and that all would be fine.
While the canal was normally calm, every time a large ships or pilot boat passed us, it created sizable wakes — and we really had to hold on!
Sunrise on Thursday, December 12 (taken from aboard Kosmos):
Eric changed the engine oil first thing in the morning, before it got hot. He also tightened a hose connection for the engine’s oil drain, where a slight oil leak had developed. Then we took Kosmos over to the fuel dock to top off the fuel tanks.
After returning to our slip, we decided to get lunch at the Iguana’s Garden Sanctuary, as the name piqued our interest. It was located near the port captain’s office. Much to our disappointment, when we arrived at the address, we saw it was a condo complex with no sign of any kind of garden or restaurant.
The closest restaurant was on the waterfront at the north end of the boardwalk that surrounded the protected basin, so we ate there.
Tuesday, December 3, 2024 – It was supposed to be an uneventful day. The plan was to do chores around the boat in preparation for our 6.5-day passage to Puerto Vallarta, then head out at around 1500 (3:00 pm).
Since we weren’t paying for another night, the marina encouraged us to leave earlier since check out is officially 1300. Their nudge turned out to be a giant blessing in disguise. Eric started up the main engine at around 1330. There was an issue with the stabilizers – when turned on, the screen said “server rebooted, call factory.”
Eric has spent the last 1.5 years renovating Kosmos. We plan to write more extensive posts about the renovation, but for the moment we’ll summarize the work with: 1) The boat was 18-years old and many things had reached their life limit and needed to be replaced – including a lot of components on the stabilizers, and 2) We outfitted the boat 18 years ago when there were only two of us. Now that there are three of us; we needed to configure the electrical and water to be better suited for three people.
Eric immediately called John Gumb Yacht Services, the company that did our stabilizer work, to help troubleshoot the problem. John Gumb had no silver-bullet answer, but the initial trouble shooting indicated it may have been electrical in nature. Eric called Weber Marine next, the company that did our electrical work (and more!). Weber also had no silver-bullet answer.
