Mangrove Cay to Allans-Pensacola

This day started slowly. We knew we could not make it all the way to Green Turtle in time to be able to check in through Customs, so we chose an intermediate step: Allans-Pensacola. It was only 50 miles from Mangrove Cay.

The first half of the trip is pretty boring: there is nothing in sight. The day was calm, however, and warming. We were not in shorts yet, but did not need sweaters.

I chose to try out our new Honda generator in earnest. It is a 2 KW super-quiet model. If our main generator goes, it will keep us cruising, but it will run long hours. The problem is that when you first turn it on in the morning, the water heater becomes energized and we usually have the coffee maker running. This leaves precious little current for charging batteries. Fortunately, the battery charger senses this and backs off until something else is turned off. Ten minutes later, the coffee maker will go out of percolate mode and into warming mode. It still draws a fair bit of current, however, and the battery charger will only pump 20 or 30 amps into the batteries. When the coffee pot is turned off and the hot water heater is satisfied (45 minutes after start-up), the AC voltage will rise a little and the battery charger will pump out 100 amps. I guess that in a perfect world, we might let the battery charger run for a while at 100 amps and then, when the charger is starting to back off because the batteries are picking up, turn on the coffee maker and hot water heater. The problem is that we want our showers and our coffee when we first wake up.

Allans-Pensacola is well protected from 3 sides and so we spent a quiet night.