Stuff Breaks, We Fix It...Hooray Boats! (Sailing Panama)

I'm up before the sun. We're in a really crowded Anchorage. Our inverter's dead, but I'm happy. Happy as a lark because we're going on a road trip. A little adventure to the city. Do some fancy stuff today. Well, go to the grocery store and the coffee shop, maybe. Let's go to Panama City. Rental car. So our friend said that it's a junker. They were right. But it's the only car on this side of the coast except for in Cologne, which was like a chicken bus to get to Cologne and then rent a car and then all this logistics. It just didn't make sense. So that's why we're here in Linton Bay and What are we gonna do? I have a list if you're not sure. Well, provisioning. We are getting an inverter. We're gonna have some coffee, some amazing coffee. You need to pick up a new grinder. Ours broke. We're gonna have some lunch. We gotta visit a brewery and we've got, well, stores, stores, hardware store, marine store. Store. And we gotta drop off Dan. But coffee first. Let's go. We got a busy day. We buzzed in. Ah, air-conditioning. Hola, buenos dias. That was fast and painless. We had to ship to Panama City so there was less hands on it. The more hands we've heard, the more problems. So I just came straight here, sat for the weekend, and now I get $10. As long as we don't get it stolen before we make it back. Thank you, Go Power. That was quick. I mean, two-day shipping. It's amazing. Out of the heat of the car. It's like a hot box in there. It's a little brutal without air-conditioning. Where are we going? Coffee. Don't know how to pronounce it, so we're not gonna try. Nope, but I can tell you it's Wilfrid. Before you pour it, this is Wilfrid Jr. Do you just go by Wilfrid or Wilfrid Jr.? I go by Wilfrid, but I say Wilfrid Jr. whenever he's coffee people. Yeah, because my father is. This is Wilfrid's son and this is his coffee shop and it's been open since 2005. No, no, no, it's five years ago. It's 2012. January of 2012 it started. First coffee shop in Panama City that you can buy good specialty coffee from Panama. Yeah. I think we pioneered our culture and now people are going over it. So I'm gonna brew, I'm gonna use the same recipe I used on the Brewer's Cup. Old Town. That's what Costco Viejo means in Spanish. And considering this neighborhood is almost 350 years old, it's fitting. So Wilfrid has taken over as our personal tour guide. In 1671, the original Panama City was burned to the ground during a brutal attack by the pirate Captain Henry Morgan. A couple years later and a few kilometers to the west, a new city was built with tall castle-like walls on a slice of land surrounded by water. All the boats you see over here have just come through the canal or they're on their way through the canal. We'll be there in maybe a month or two. It looks crazy here because the tide is down. It's a pretty dramatic tide here. This is the quick tour of Panama City. Today, Costco Viejo is the oldest European settlement on the Pacific coast of the Americas and it's definitely the heart of Panama. It's where hip meets history and the narrow cobblestone streets are giving us that old European vibe. This is passion fruit sauce. Right? That's supposed to be for once. It's good we had traditional Panamanian preparation. Okay, hold on. We should say our goodbyes now because it may have to be like get out of the car and go. That's true. It's going to be a jump out. Thank you guys so much. We enjoyed having you, Dan. Yes, what are you going to do now that you've got to go back to regular life? No, I'm not going to return to regular life. I caught the disease. I'm going to see Boston and then go figure out what I'm going to do next. Check into RV vans. That'll be my first step. Dan's going to be a van lifer. Dan the van man? Dan the coffee van man. What did you think about the geisha? I'm trying to keep that as a separate experience. Because I don't want to enjoy it too much. Bye! Have fun tomorrow. Will do. Enjoy your hotel. I know. Okay, $400 at the grocery store. Car battery for our generator. A bunch of other miscellaneous stuff. Provisions for sunblast. Yep, we should be good to go for a nice long two hour drive home. And we have to load up all this in the dinghy. Nice good way to go out. By the time we got everything loaded up in the dinghy, well unloaded from the car, loaded in the dinghy, back to the boat, unloaded from the dinghy, into the boat, oh man it was 1 o'clock or so by the time we got to bed. Yeah, getting a slow start. Slightly slow start this morning. But I wanted just to share exactly what the issues were. Well, no exact I guess in boating. But more electrical issues. Our inverter started acting weird during the crossing. And it went out on us a couple days of not using it. It came back to life. It seemed to have been functioning normally for the past month and a half. And then one day, like a week ago, maybe a week and a half ago it just died completely. The charger stopped working. The inverter stopped working. Everything. So I contacted Go Power and they got me a new one quickly and we had it sent to that DHL office. The main DHL office there in Panama City. And that's the entire reason we went to Panama City. While we were there, I also picked up another battery. Still not sure what's going on with our generator. It's either not charging correctly. But I didn't want to damage our lithium battery. So I picked up this guy. It was about $100. I'm going to monitor this over the next couple of months and see what happens. It's a whole lot easier to lose a $100 battery than an expensive lithium one. Go Power also sent us this. This is a little tiny pure sine wave inverter. So we can get rid of the crappy little modified one that we bought at the China store. China number 4. And I got this temperature switch too that will kick on automatically. It will turn the fan on at I think 85 degrees. So when the compartment starts to warm up, another exhaust fan will start sucking the hot air out and get it away from the inverter. So we think it's a heat issue with the old inverter. So yeah, it took me the better part of a day to install this. And hopefully all of our power issues will be solved. It will take you the better part of a day? Yeah. Okay. Let's keep going. That's it. Got it pretty close. Let me just tell you, these things, the extender thingies, come in amazingly amazing handy when working in these tight spaces in here. I was able to get all the screws out unbolt everything and I'm about ready to pull out this bad boy. What's up? Well, while you are taking care of the inverter and the generator battery, now that everybody is gone, it's a good day to go through all of our provisions, double check my inventory, make sure we're good to go for the next few months because there's I think not many supplies or stores in San Blas which is where we're kind of headed next. So I'm doing this and then I've got to clean the bottom of the boat because we have some serious barnacles growing on the hull and on our props. Chore day. It's just chore day. I did check these wires once before but it was when it was installed in there so it was really a pain to get to them but yeah, everything seems nice and solid. I'm interested to take this whole thing apart see if anything's fried on the inside. It sure would be nice to see something fried on the inside because then we know it's a heat issue or we might be able to diagnose what the issue was. I don't like not knowing, installing something new and then not being sure if it's going to happen again. Oh, yep. Definitely have some damage in here. Take a photo of this, send it to Go Power, see what they say. It's dirty. It's not too bad. It's not as bad as I thought it was going to be. So the bottom paint's working well. Yeah, bottom paint is working really well. It actually slips off so easy. I'm just going to go get a nice little glove. That'll be that. I heard back from the Go Power people and they said it was definitely the heat that destroyed the FETs. That's what they call them. F-E-T-S are those little things that failed. This is why we think it happened. Here's how it's mounted in the cabinet here. This is the stuff that gets really hot. There's two big exhaust fans that suck the air off of here and blow it this way. The way it's installed, there's actually a wall right here so the hot air is coming here, getting trapped. It's going up and then getting sucked back in. In order to keep this from happening again, I'm going to install another fan over here that's going to suck the air away from the inverter. It'll hopefully blow it through this little tiny hole and go out into the back, the lazarette basically, of the sailboat. Then from the front, we actually have a fan installed that just wasn't connected when we installed this inverter. They decided not to connect it for whatever reason. We'll have cool air coming in from here blowing on these FETs, getting sucked out by these two fans, and then getting sucked out again by a bigger fan. Hopefully, that will keep any more issues from happening in the future. Now I just got to put the new one in. All clean? Close. Pretty close. Got all the barnacles off. Better. It may not look like much progress, but I'm wiring in my last wire for the fans, and then I just have to put it all back together. I'm going to do it. Going to do it. Going to do it! Everything was going really well until I was putting the new inverter in and one of the cables dropped, so red touched black. A little bit of spark, no big deal, but the lithium batteries went to sleep. The house batteries, so that's why I'm holding this light. All of our 12 volt power is out, so we're going to have to get up in the morning, go to the marina, and finish. Man, and then I figured out I lost my tripod. I left it in Panama City, and then a Spanish mackerel flew through the window and busted our screen. Got guts everywhere. It's just been one of those damn days. Look how crazy it is in here still. It's like 1030. But how about that mackerel that busted through the screen? Let's go down and show him the hole. It's impressive. He startled me, and I grabbed him and I threw him back outside, but I should have kept him. He wasn't quite big enough. I should have given him to the cats, but flew right through the hole. Can you believe that? I don't know why those mantis lights do that. That's ridiculous. Here. That does it too. Well, son of a... Well, there you go. Pay attention to the hole. It's not flickering. The mackerel came right through that hole. He was this big. He made that hole. It still smells like fish in here. I know. Fish guts. Well, good night, everyone. Hooray boats. Can't make this stuff up. Turns out the batteries are perfectly fine. The spark blew these massive fuses. Fortunately, it's just as simple as removing the old fuses, putting in the new ones, and not letting black touch red this time. A few minutes of work, and we have power again. Where Jason has been battling with electrical problems, and it's me versus the mole. I don't know what it is about the environment that's different here, but it is definitely different. The black mold, the little black spots just get on inside the boat, outside the boat, on the deck. It's like a non-stop job. It's me and vinegar. Got the inverter installed. Everything is working. I was coming to do an oil change on the generator, and I think I may have found the culprit for some of the issues we've been experiencing. You can see a nice burn mark here. What happened was this plate jiggled over and touched the wires. That's giving me a low voltage problem on the generator, which might have caused the battery to die, which might have caused some of the inverter issues. I don't know. Go fishing! Got my trusty getting tools. Getting tools? A little mirror, a little magnet, a little claspy thingy. That could have been a whole lot worse. Sadly, it's the only one I have, so I had to go for it. Let's try this again. 120 volts. That's a good sign. Now let's run a load on it. Go into bulk charge. Putting in 100 amps. Still got 115 volts. That's good. No. Here we go again. Because the boat fund just doesn't end. Fortunately, we're somewhere where there's not a lot going on. So, jammer broke. Seating up our line. Don't really know exactly what's going on, but that's what we're going to figure out. So we can sail. Otherwise, we can't sail because of the dang jammer. This line is brand new, but you can see it's getting all chewed up. This is our Genoa sheet. We just replaced all of our lines in Fort Lauderdale, and it was recommended that we go with a bigger size just because it's a little nicer on the hands when you're working with it, and it is the line we work with all the time. And it says right here on our jammer that this size of line is supposed to be fine. But what has happened is the sail over, it worked no problem. We weren't having any issues. And then we got to Bocas and we're sailing around the area and all of a sudden it became impossible to pull it through and it was getting really hard to let it out. The jammer was just getting jammed up when it wasn't supposed to be. So, we thought maybe the jammer was failing, but looks like what's happening is this line has swelled now that it's had some time. Salt, rain, I have no idea, but now it's really too thick to go inside of here. So, luckily we have our spinnaker line which we had put through here when we blew a line in the Bahamas, so we know it works through here. Sure enough we ran this through and a couple of others and now it's sliding through no problem. But either way I think we've learned that going with the top end of what the jammer says I don't know that I'll ever do that again because I'll be afraid of this problem happening. The line swells and now it's too big and it's getting caught up in there. I'll stay within a notch down I think. Yeah. But hey, simpler solution than replacing a jammer. Anyway. We inspected the jammers, the cam part of the jammers, that's the little teeth that hold onto the rope, and they're both wearing so I know we're going to have to replace both of our jammers, so I'm going to measure them now because we don't want to do any fiberglass work when we order the new ones. 7 centimeters 7 7. Hey there little guy. Show off. Right hanging upside down. Holding on by his tail. Take that 007 admission impossible. Not sure why these monkeys are here but we've read that people fed them we've read that they're dangerous we've read that somebody lives here but the house doesn't have any doors or anything and there used to be a dock right back there if you can see it. Anyway, there's three of them we've seen that guy and there's one up here in this tree right in front of us. Check him out. What's up you little brown bellied monkey? Monkey! Mono, mono. Definitely not your average trip to the gas station. Monkeys and pelicans Hold on. $25 for 7 gallons. Not too bad. I think we're about ready to go. We just need, what do we need? Food. Groceries. If we can find any. If we can find it. The veggie man did not come this morning. That worked out. We thought we were going to come into town and hit up the little tiny convenience store, grocery store thing for some eggs and whatever they had. They had no eggs. But wouldn't you know that the guy with the food truck the fruit and veggie truck was driving through town at the exact moment. So, we have fresh veggies! And he wasn't just waiting for us I swear. No, he was just driving by. Impeccable timing. And we are literally out of everything so that was amazing. So excited. Funny how excited you get about food as a sailor. It's so rare to find it. Okay. Alright! Let's go to Sand Blast. To actually start the day. Life is a running loop of adventure and maintenance regardless of what sort of life we're living. Mowing the lawn, shoveling snow out of the driveway, cleaning out the rain gutters or scrubbing the barnacles off our home. It's the necessary maintenance required for the adventure to continue. And sometimes, maintenance is the adventure. Wash, rinse, repeat and sail on. Tomorrow morning, we pick up the hook and head for the remote Sand Blast Islands. But, that's an adventure for next week. Until then, click over to our website, say hello and see what didn't make the video. Thanks for watching!