So, we are back in Puerto Santo Thomas. We will only stay one night this time. We are anchored very close to where we anchored last time.
Overall a fairly quiet day. Not much wind until we arrived here and we have about 20 knots as the sunsets.
We made water today, mainly because the last time we made water, I forgot to stop the fresh water flush (we have to do that for 10 minutes every 5 days or after every time we make water). I let it run for a couple of hours, and we were down to about 30% tank level when we arrived in Ensenada. So, we ran the generator and made water for about 3 hours today and made about 60 gallons of fresh water. On the plus side, the water is very high quality, normal city water is something less than 500 ppm (parts per million) TDS (total dissolved solids), our water maker puts out something on the order of 75 ppm. At this point most of what is in our water tank was made by our water maker and it tastes pretty good.
We do have a Seagull Water Filter that I could put the cartridge in which would be a 0.4 micron filter, which only goes to the cold water faucets (galley, and both head sinks), which would make the water even better. Reasons I have not put the cartridge in, they are expensive, (about $150 each), don’t last long (about 500 gallons) and the water we have had in our tanks has not been real clean until now. In fact, we have plugged our faucet strainers a couple of times. Which is a wire mesh the same as your kitchen faucet/bathroom faucet at home. The Seagull is similar to a Brita water filter, for drinking water.
I just downloaded our weather route for tomorrow, and found that the external antenna was not plugged in real well. This is probably the single worst part of this device. The Iridium GO! works well overall, but this plug is a proprietary plug, and is really bad. It does not stay plugged in and I think it is bent as well. The cable is shielded and a small diameter, it makes a 90 degree turn to go into the side of the Iridium GO! and it has a very small wire inside of the plug that has to go into the socket of the device. I have added a rubber band to hold it in place, we will see how well that works.
It appears we are in for another rolly night here. We should have expected it, after all that is what we had for our previous two nights here. We will get up at 6 am and get underway by 8 am or so. We have about 40 miles to go to Punta Colnett.
Have I mentioned how bad the external antenna is for the Iridium GO!?
Wow, it is horrible! This is of course a draft, and won’t be published until we have cell service, hopefully tomorrow.
This is the plug that provides the external antenna to the Iridium GO!
This is the socket on the Iridium GO!
This is the screen shot of the Anchor App that I referred to. The heavy marks in the middle are our tracks for two days of anchoring in Puerto Santo Thomas, the marks to the left side are our tracks for the third day here. When I took the screen shot, I moved the anchor on the app, which changed where the circle was, which is the alarm point. This shows how close we are anchored to where we were the first two days.