Laura Cove, Simoom Sound, and Echo Bay

Hello and welcome back! In the last blog post we flexed our seafood hunting muscles and explored some history at Billy's Museum. In this blog post we get a small break in the rain and run into some issues with the boat (oh no!).

The maps below show our path (in brown) that is covered in this blog post.

Our travels are depicted in brown

Travel stats for travel covered in this blogpost:
Distance: 21.4 nautical miles
Travel time: Approx 5 hours
Days: 5 days

Video highlights from this portion of the trip!

After a nice stay in Shoal Harbor we made our way to Laura Cove.  It was a nice little cove, but it started to rain hard as soon as we got there so we stayed in the boat that evening and left early the next morning. Not much to say about Laura Cove other than we had the whole place to ourselves... tired of me saying that yet?!

After a soggy evening at Laura Cove we scooted up to the Sound entrance, and fresh off our success in Joe Cove, we threw the shrimp pot in about 300 feet of water. Onward to one of the anchorages! We chose a spot in Macintosh Bay tucked in between some islands and set to building a rain shelter on the boat because we were fed up with the rain! Wouldn't ya know it, the minute we had our rain shelter up the rain stopped! That's the way she goes right? No problem- we were just so excited for a break in the rain. At this point the boat was getting to be a bit damp so the next morning with the sun shining, we opened all the hatches and dried out everything- we love that sun! I got to work on a little engine project that I had been putting off for a long time. I had purchased a coolant overflow tank months previously and just needed to install it. It felt so nice to get some boat work done with all the windows and hatches open. The project was finished in time for happy hour and chess. There's more information on the video concerning the coolant tank- check that out for additional details.

Our anchorage in Simoom Sound

Happy hour on the front deck

Cheers to the sun!

Scenic dog mission

Returning from picturesque dog mission

Another view of our anchorage in McIntosh Bay of Simoom Sound

The last morning in Simoom Sound started early and unexpectedly. We awoke at 3AM to our carbon monoxide battery alarm going off. Huh? The engine wasn't running, no fire going, we had a few windows open, and we felt fine. What the heck? A closer look reveals that the noise is the battery alarm on the carbon monoxide detector... which is connected to the house batteries. Another funny thing is that the vberth (bedroom) lights are dim.... must be the batteries... That's odd because we hadn't done anything differently than we had for the last 6 weeks of the trip. Slightly concerned, but not overly worried, we turned off EVERYTHING, and went back to bed.

Soggy Simoom Sound morning

We were hopeful that when we fired up the engine, we would recharge the batteries. When we were ready to leave the anchorage, we fired up the engine and tried to turn on the chartplotter... to which it flickered and then nothing.... radio doesn't work either... oh shit. Starting to become more worried, we waited and let the engine run to give the batteries some time to charge. 40 minutes later we tried turning the chartplotter on... still nothing. Oh shit big trouble! The engine is not charging the house batteries (the engine has a separate starter batteries- thank goodness!). So our entire electrical system is down- time for a course of action. We had planned on going to Kwatsi Bay, but knowing they didn't have power we decided to immediately head for Pierre's Marina in Echo Bay. We will sort this out there. We have a chartplotter type app on the phone and we can use that to navigate to Echo Bay.

The house batteries in question

We made our way to Echo Bay, watching the phone battery like a hawk seeing as though we only had 25% left. On the way we picked up our shrimp pot and it was record catch! More than 150 red spotted shrimp! We were still nervous about the battery situation, but the shrimp haul certainly improved the mood aboard.

Pierre's Marina

Ok, so we made it Pierre's Marina, and we are the only people there... except for Pierre. He greeted us and we started to tell him about our battery situation. Right away he offered up ideas and help, which was very welcome! After talking with him we checked the batteries' water level which turned out to be low. He didn't have any distilled water, but he did have some old batteries up the way. We went and transferred the old battery's distilled water into ours (literally pouring an old battery's liquid into a bucket then pouring that into, then charged it up with Pierre's industrial battery charger (apparently we aren't the only boaters with battery woes). We did this for the two house batteries that were low on voltage and water. Once charged up we installed them back in the boat and tested them by turning on a bunch of stuff. Chartplotter... that works! Radio.... that works! Back in business!

Another view of Pierre's Marina

While that was a victory, it didn't rule out that all the problems such as the alternator not charging properly, or will the batteries hold the charge, and why did the batteries get drawn so low? We would test the alternator question the next day when we started traveling again, but getting to the source of why our batteries got drawn so low was the most important issue.

I should probably mention that I did cause a *very* small short in the electrical system before the system went down, but I've done that before and it never killed batteries... Was it that and the combo of low water in the two batteries? As we pondered this and tested a few other theories we started to hear a clicking sound... A sound we have never heard before. We couldn't place where it was coming from. It was forward, but where? A few more switches flipped and we discover that noise is only on when we have our chartplotter/sail instruments on. After an intense hunt we come to discover our depthsounder (which has no moving parts) is making the clicking sound. Come to think of it, our depthsounder has been acting a little funny lately...
We unplugged it and the noise stopped.

So the theory is that the depthsounder has a small short that drew down the batteries to a level that they couldn't bounce back from. We probably never noticed the clicking sound because it was so faint, we would only be able to hear it when the boat was dead silent. However we only have the chartplotter and instruments on when we are traveling (engine running etc). Hence, we never heard it. Who knows how long that has been going on!
That's my theory, but we won't know if that fixes the problem until we leave the dock and test the alternator and batteries....  oh no a CLIFFHANGER!!!!!

Hang in there like Sylvester Stallone and come back next week as put our theories about the batteries and alternator to the test!

Disco using Jenny as a pillow. What a silly dog.