Crooked Island: Watermakers and Long Cay

Saturday, April 21, 2007

022-33.540 N
074-21.300 W

Ahoy from Long Cay on Crooked Island!

When you last heard from your intrepid cruisers, I said that I was having problems with the watermaker. When I went to turn it on the other day, it wouldn't start and the breaker kept tripping. I eventually got it turning, but it was making a *bad* sound. Yesterday I pulled it out and determined what the problem was.

A water maker is a simple device. You have a motor which dives a pump which pressurizes salt water to 800 PSI. You take this 800 PSI water and feed it to a reverse osmosis (RO) membrane. About 12-15% of the water gets converted to drinkable water and the rest goes back to the ocean. The new system has a big motor as I'm pushing 3 gallons per minute of water past the membrane. The pump and the motor generate a lot of vibration.

When I pulled the motor and pump out I found that the high pressure hose from the pump was touching the electrical box on the motor and it had abraded through the cover on the electrical box and then the hose had sprung a leak. It sprayed water into electrical box which got into the motor. The hole in the electrical box cover is only 1/4" x 1/8" and it amazes me that both of these wore through at basically the same time. Had the hose gone first, I would have seen it right away. The problem was that the hose was too long and I had to S it from the pump, past the motor and then to the membrane. Unfortunately this was behind the motor and I didn't see that there was contact.

Believe me, Long Cay is very remote. In order to figure out how to get parts shipped into here we took the dinghies to the ferry dock on the S side of Long Cay. I'm not sure how the ferry gets in/out of here as there was barely enough water to get the dinghies out when we left. The sign at the dock says "Welcome to Long Cay, the Home of Prosperity" and from there, there's a long, dusty that leads to the settlement. I think that the sign was posted by an extreme optimist!

The road to the settlement is about 1.5 miles long and passes by the site of an old prison and salt ponds. The settlement consisted of a couple dozen homes, many of which where in bad shape. Some of them had satellite TV antennas, and others cooked outside over a wood fire. I have no idea what anyone does for work around there.

We found the Batelco office, which was a small yellow building with a very nice man named Kermit working inside. The phone system doesn't work very well and to place a single call it easily required dialing the same number a dozen times. We were able to piece together a rough plan on how to get the parts shipped in. Hopefully my dad will be able to verify the details and we'll get the parts shipped in to here by the middle of next week. As luck would have it, Unicorn has a watermaker from the same company, so I can use my old pump and we can swap hoses, so I'll be able to fill our tanks.

Today we're headed to Delectable Bay on Acklins Island because the winds have switched to the NE and we're bouncing in the waves.

-- Geoff & Sue
Log ID: 954