Adirondack has hiccupped, finally.... Trouble on the boat

So we pulled into Wilmington, planning on a seamless crew transfer from Bob and Susan to Doug and Linda. Just after we got in, I noted that the anchor chain had a bit of slack in it and hit the windlass button to take it up. The windlass gave up a funny chattering noise, sort of like a car starter with a dying solenoid. And then it quit altogether. This was bad, because we need the windlass to pull up the heavy anchor and chain. It's too heavy, even without a hernia. But, it could have been lots worse; we could have easily pulled out of here with the problem and not noticed it until we were going to anchor out somewhere. Or it could have happened after we dropped the anchor out in some secluded spot instead of in a well-respected boat repair facility.

I couldn't figure out the problem and had the boys here look at it. A day and a half later came the verdict: The wiring was not good enough to support the windlass and had failed in some unknown location. A quick fix would be to replace the one wire, but future issues like this would be likely. They stated it would take a day to fix it, but the labor and market rate for the wire would cost at least $1000. I decided to tackle it myself.

We went down to West Marine, bought the materials for a bit less than half price (with my employee discount) on Saturday morning and I started in after lunch and finished Sunday morning. It was a tough job, but Doug and Linda helped with the wire routing. AND IT WORKS!!! We have some great photos of me crawling out of these impossible corners, but this blog thing won't upload pictures, for some reason.

It's RAINING here today. We were going to push off with the outgoing tide this afternoon, but will re-evaluate this afternoon. So we'll go grocery shopping and other stuff instead. There are lots worse places to be stuck, that's for sure. And I'm not going to complain, as this is really the first issue we've had with the boat since May.