1.3.2022 - 1.9.2022 Our Upgrades List

Hassel Island has been a great find for a calm, protected anchorage with easy access to Crown Bay marina, provisioning, and the airport!

This week we started the process of upgrades to our home and also some more repairs.

We contacted a company in Florida that does hardtop covers over the helm area. It’s hard to explain without showing pictures, but a hardtop provides stronger protection from weather, allows for more surface area to install solar panels, and gives us easier access to our mainsail. We put down a deposit and it’s expected to ship to us in St. Thomas early-mid March.

We also contacted a marine electrical engineer (Jesse) to start planning our battery upgrades. We want to install lithium iron-phosphate batteries so that our house battery bank is upgraded. Lithium will allow us to run more things, maintenance free, on battery power rather than relying on the generator and engines. Jesse is also helping up upgrade our solar array – we currently have 4 panels that are 270 watt and we’re going to up each panel to 370 watt (adding 400 watts total power). With the new watt power, we also will be upgrading our solar charge controllers to carry the load. Lastly, Jessie is going to install a new inverter which will allow us to run more AC devices (outlets, appliances, devices, air conditioning). Mike ended up chatting with Jesse about all the boat things for 3.5 hours while I was working! In summary, all of this is so that our boat will work more like a house (we will have power without thinking about what type of power and where the power is coming from) and enable us to be more off the grid :)

Over the New Year holiday, our watermaker broke – Mike tried to troubleshoot but couldn’t figure out the cause. So we reached out to a supplier and they came on Friday to diagnose the problem. Luckily it was an easy fix where a new hose was able to be replaced.

We explored a little more of St. Thomas this week by trying their bus system, known as the Safari. It costs $2/person each ride and basically does a loop around the whole island. We were able to pick up our mail in Red Hook, attempt to buy new batteries for our engines (they were out of stock), and did a massive trip to OfficeMax!

This week Ollie has been getting much more comfortable on the boat! Up until now he’s been pretty supervised by either Mike or me because we worry about him falling into the water. Several times this week he’s taken it upon himself to just leave the indoor salon and go to the bow to potty, or to the outdoor salon to sunbathe, up to the helm to sit in the wind, or to the sugar scoops to sniff around and look at fish!

On the weekend, we motored over to the Red Hook area so that we could refuel the dinghy and pick up more mail. We originally planned to stay in the Red Hook anchorage through the weekend, but the activity of the ferries and current was far too rolly! Instead, we headed back to Christmas Cove.

On Sunday we had a surprise – a sailboat anchored in Christmas Cove had a live band! They must have made an announcement over the VHF radio (we missed it) because lots of people came out to their boat on their floaties and dinghies to listen. We made ourselves some pina coladas and enjoyed the show from the helm with Ollie :)