Valencia Still

Tuesday/Wednesday, August 26 – 27, 2014 –

We had planned to leave Valencia on Tuesday but the winds suddenly seemed to increase contradicting the forecast.  A walk to the end of the docks about 11 pm last night showed the seas to be whipped up, confirming the decision to delay.  A one day delay is really a two day delay because the winds were forecast to be from the wrong direction the next day. But we don’t mind, we really like Valencia and the marina is super nice.  So, instead of heading out, we are doing projects today, and tomorrow.  First we dragged the dinghy up onto the dock to scrap off the growth and wash the bottom.  Then Bob managed to find the pinhole that had eluded us causing the dinghy to go soft after a few days. After some on-line repair instructions and an aptly applied patch the dinghy was back in service–good as new.

Other cruisers had told us about the heat in the Med in the summer.  They were not exaggerating.  The temperatures are high, but the sun is brutal.  We have still seen no rain since mid-June and there is rarely a cloud in the sky.  Today hit a new high for us – 108 degrees.  That was in the shade.  The water temperature here is 89 degrees.  After our dinghy projects we hid inside the boat with fans blowing getting computer work done.  We remind ourselves that by October it will be cold sailing down the coast of Italy.  We need to enjoy this while we can!

Every night we retire to our air conditioned cabin with great relief and thanking out lucky stars that we had the foresight to convert the boat’s electrics to handle European power.

To be more specific for interested readers, when we refit the boat we had the electrical system designed by a engineer to handle US and European power.  This was accomplished by installing an international charger and a large inverter to handle the loads we planned to run in Europe.  This would include one of the three air conditioners, microwave oven, computer and all the outlets.  If we installed a larger charger and inverter we could run the entire boat but the size of the equipment would become an issue.  The hot water heater was converted to 240 volts so it would not care if it received European 230 volts single phase or US 240 volts split phase, and European outlets were installed throughout the boat to handle some loads directly, like those pesky hairdryers.  A separate European power panel was installed above the regular panel to handle the switchover and it all works like a charm.  The charger takes AC power from either source and sends it to the battery bank as DC power, the inverter takes the DC power and inverts it back to AC (110V 60 Hz)  to run the US devices.  It sounds like the electricity is going in circles but it solves the power dilemma very nicely.  It is no wonder that more boats are going for this technology rather than the large and noisy transformers to convert the power.