Today was all about restocking the boat, doing laundry, and organizing for the trip back to Seattle in August. The guys that we purchased the air conditioner from came to look at the bad controller unit. While it took us a whole day to sail from Herradura where their shop is to Quepos, of course it’s only 46 miles – an hour by car. So they headed down with their debugging gear. They were a bit surprised when they arrived aboard the boat to find that Dave had soldered up a cable that allowed him to plug in the controller unit without actually hooking it up to the compressor unit for bench testing purposes. Dave got them to quickly grasp what he had done to diagnose the issue down to the controller. Fortunately they had brought another thermostat with them. And low and behold between them what they discovered was that the new controller isn’t compatible with our older thermostat control. Despite the technical manuals saying that the new controller should have worked with our older thermostats. This is a $200 replacement part that we will need to purchase when we are home in the US in a couple of months. They could order it here, but it would take weeks to get here and by then we will be in Panama (logistics are everything to us these days). Meanwhile using the new compressor with the old controller and old thermostat is just fine. The cool thing about getting a new thermostat is that the newer unit has a mode that lets us dehumidify the boat, and with the new thermostat we will have the control to actually use that feature.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Dave’s work with Zetron has been winding down the past 6 months. So just two weeks shy of completing his 29th year at Zetron, today is Dave’s last day with the company. Well, that is till we get back to Seattle and he knocks on their door again – at which point they will no doubt rehire him if they have any openings! The bummer for us is that now we will have to pay for health insurance which doesn’t come cheap!
For dinner we were going to go into town. But another evening squall came up and we knew we would get soaked walking over there. So we went to the Marina pub instead. The pub is located up on the second story overlooking the marina and we watched quite a lightning show from the balcony. The lights went out in the restaurant several times. On the menu there was a giant “monkey punch” drink that Dave ordered. Mike said it gave a whole new meaning to monkey punch. Not clear which one of them in this picture is the monkey!
