Today was one of those boat ownership days I’d rather forget about. It reminded me too much about why I hate boats. We noticed an hour or so into our motor north that the batteries weren’t charging right. The voltage was sitting at 12.3, way too low. I opened up the battery compartment and got to work with the voltmeter. The voltage on the starter battery where the alternator wire comes in was 14.0, right where it should have been I think. However the house bank was still sitting at 12.3. The two banks were connected right, and just to be sure I grabbed a spare battery cable and hooked them to each other directly. Same thing.

So then I started disconnecting batteries. As I did this the voltage on the house bank gradually climbed. By the time I had disconnected three of them, leaving just two, the voltage had climbed to about 12.8, still well below the 14.0, but closer.

Truth be told I don’t know much about batteries. On our last boat we put a new set on when we left and they worked just fine for four years. What I think I know is that when you are running a series of batteries like this if one goes bad they all go bad. I fear that this is the case. I fear it because even back in the States getting wholesale prices they were over a thousand dollars.

I should mention that this seems to have started just three or four days ago. I didn’t realize it at the time because when I’d look at our battery monitor it was showing like 12.9 volts when the engine was running and after shutting down it would settle at 12.6. But now that I think about it I wasn’t seeing it get up in the high 13’s or 14.

So anyway, that was the first issue. Then we realized that the fridge wasn’t getting cold. It was running, but the temp wasn’t moving. Looking in at the engine compartment I could see dripping coming from one of the fittings on the fridge compressor. Just yesterday I was in the engine compartment checking fluids and tightening belts. I must have done something to that hose fitting.

When we got in I got to work on that. I actually knew before that that fitting was a problem area. I knew that when I had the compressor off the mount it would leak, but back on it would stop. Tightening it didn’t do any good. So today I made a quick fix and caulked it up. It might not be one hundred percent, but a slow refrigerant leak I can deal with.

The next problem to tackle was how to get refrigerant into the system. I had bottles of 134A refrigerant, but the hose that I had on the boat didn’t fit the can, and the hose that I bought with the cans didn’t fit the boat fitting. I needed one end of each of the two hoses. So I sliced them both in half and went about figuring out how to get the two small hoses joined. Long story short I somehow made the Frankenstein hose fitting I needed, hooked up the can, and filled up the system again. It worked, the fridge was cold in an hour.

I am so over this engine driven refrigeration. It’s great for a backup system or for flicking on when we happen to be motoring along anyway, but it’s just been too unreliable to depend on it day after day. When I talked to the company that makes it, SeaFrost, I found out that I can replace our AC system with a DC system by simply unplugging the old one and plugging in the new. No new wiring or tubing needed. A DC system is definitely in the cards this summer.

All right, that’s a lot of nonsense. We are in Puerto Escondido now. It’s a pretty amazing bay, almost completely landlocked save for one narrow pass. It must have been a great place a decade ago, but then the Mexican government decided to plop a tiny ten slip marina in it, fill the rest of the bay with moorings, and charge the mooring price just for anchoring. I mean it’s still a nice place for a break, and it’s a short drive to Loreto, so we’re going to stay a few days, let Ouest ride her bike, swim in their tiny lap pool, unload a big pile of garbage, fill up the diesel and water tanks, and then decide where to next. Though with our battery issues that decision may be quite limited. We’ll see.