Pop!

I’ve been doing a good job of honoring our no work Sunday policy, and to tell the truth, I had planned to continue that into today in light of this being Easter Monday, and the island’s chandleries all being closed. Unfortunately, as I noted the other day, sometimes unplanned bits of work pop up. And pop is a good description for this particular one!

I was down below in the aft cabin, doing a bit of website work*, when a semi-loud bang occurred, driving me to investigate. It took me no more that 30 seconds to find the source of the noise: a bolt on one of the braces supporting our wind generator had snapped.

It’s been quite breezy the past week, and our wind genny has been steadily pumping the amps into our battery bank. So much so that we haven’t had to run our diesel generator at all for charging the batteries. The strong gusts had obviously been stressing the wind generator though, and the support parted at what must have been the weakest link.

I was able to find a bolt to replace the one that broke, but unfortunately, after inspecting the entire setup, I noted that another fitting was bent, requiring it to be replaced. As the chandleries and rigging shops are closed today, I improvised a support with a piece of line and a trucker’s hitch. My guess is that it will do until tomorrow.

*The website work that I referred to above related to performing security scans, and updating passwords, etc. on our site. I’ve been forced to do that because our site was, at some point in the past, hacked! The changes the hackers made to the site were transparent to all of us (don’t worry!), but it did allow them to piggyback on our bandwidth. I only found out about this when during a random Google search, our site popped up and I saw the warning notice that had been placed below our link. Not cool!

With the fantastic help of an internet friend, David, and from Peter from the boat Penny Lane, I was able to get the altered code removed. Hopefully we’ll now be able to get Google to remove that warning, and with the additional security that I’ve installed, we won’t be troubled by anything like this again in the future. Thank you very much guys, I couldn’t have done it without you!