30 Aug 13

Another short trip today and high water is not until 12:00. We slept in till 09:00 and had Swedish pancakes for breakfast. When we finally got ready to go, the anchor winch would not work (either the winch or, more likely, the control system is not working). After looking for obvious faults for a few minutes, and finding none, I just pulled the chain and anchor up by hand - no problem when we are anchored in only 15 ft or so. We moved on down the road to Church Creek and anchored manually. Then I spent most of the afternoon trouble-shooting the anchor winch/control system. Unfortunately, I could not find a fault and it looks like we will have to pull the anchor up by hand tomorrow, as well. Fortunately, we will be in a marina tomorrow night, and for the next 2 weeks, in Charleston, so I should be able to find expert assistance in solving this dilemma. You may remember that we had a similar/identical problem back in February. I resolved the problem then by changing out the control relay, determining that there was nothing wrong with the original and simply re-installing the original relay, at which point everything worked fine; i.e., I actually changed nothing, but the system started working. I hate intermittent electrical problems.

After we got anchored, the wind piped up to E 15 - 20 with gusts to 22. No big deal, but it did cool things off a bit.