We were in Carrickfergus after picking up my mail, so now it was time to cast off the lines and head back to Bangor. One issue was all the weed in and around Salty Lass, so we had used our boat hook prior to departure to collect all the weed and move it to a safer place for us and other boats. Then on the way out, a little speed boat came in, but it was a lot quicker than us so we managed to avoid a collision. Being that close would of made me panic, but Beverley is a lot calmer than me when it comes to close quarters action.

We had to motor across, then we were about half way home when the winds turned up and we were able to produce one of our joyful sounds on Salty Lass and that is the engine being turned off and us travelling by just the wind. Our other joyful sound on Salty Lass, is when we pull the electrical lead out of Salty Lass and the flap covering the lead makes a clinking sound. Beverley and I call this the sound of departure. Although sailing bought us joy, we did have one major nag and that was we had to turn the fridge off as it was simply not working.

Fridge issues

So what is currently happening with our fridge is that the compressor and fan starts, then the compressor fails and the fan carries on. The level on the batteries also reduces so that rather being in the green zone and over 12volts as it should, the battery level is in the green red zone which is 10 to 12 volts, with our battery reading 11.something volts. For our fridge to work correctly, this is far too low.

So that our viewers can hear the subtle sound differences, Beverley has boosted the sound clip in the video and added a countdown so that you are prepared to hear the difference. For me, who does not have Beverley's super hearing, the sound boosting really helps.

As far as we are concerned, we have tested everything:-

• Resting voltage on batteries - we disconnected the batteries from the boat systems, and let them rest for over and hour before testing their voltage and that was fine
• Wire resistance - We tested this in two ways
• Resistance mode -By using the multimeter in resistance mode, and putting the cable in circuit we could see that the resistance of the cable was 0 Ohms
• Voltage mode - We put the cable in circuit and tested the voltage as both ends of the cable. There was no difference in the voltage readings, so there is no issue with the wire

Issues with wiring

While we had been testing the fridge and the wiring, we found that at the batteries we had 12.7volts, while at the feed to the fridge we had 12.2volts, so 1/2 a volt was dropped. We found that this voltage drop was across the lights, so although the fridge and the lights are in parallel, they were appearing as if they were in series. Strange but true.

Sailing

While we discussed our fridge issues, we continued to sail, making adjustments as we went. So I sheeted in the Genoa, while Beverley tweaked the traveller so that we could sail closer to the wind and shape our course more Easterly. We did a tack and I adjusted the sails by adjusting the traveller and other lines so that as many tell tales as possible were lifting. The big issue was that realistically we were sailing too close to the wind, as Beverley was using a technique called pinching. This is when you sail as close to the wind as possible, but because, you get too close, you have to fall off and pick up speed. We managed to sail and pinch all the rest of the trip, before it was engine on and a motor into our slip.