May 16th - Von Donop Inlet, Cortes Island

The service tech worked on the boat for 3-4 hours this morning and the outcome was not totally satisfying. The best outcome would have been a "smoking gun" bad battery that we simply wire around, providing us a somewhat smaller, but totally adequate house bank. The actual outcome of the battery load test was two batteries not quite as strong as the other two in the bank of four but still in pretty good condition as best as can be determined.

As it turned out, the house bank was not wired in the preferred fashion for parallel batteries. That might account for two of the four taking the brunt of the burden and becoming slightly weakened over time. We rotated a couple of batteries (similar to rotating tires on a car) to even the "wear-and-tear" and then changed the wiring slightly to the preferred method. We'll monitor the batteries performance over the next several days and see whether that makes a difference.

We left Campbell River after lunch and went to a BC Marine Park, Von Donop Inlet, a relatively short distance (~23 NM) away. It is an extremely long inlet (nearly 3 miles). In general it is protected from the weather but the direction of today's wind funneled down the inlet and surprised us with its strength. We are anchored (May 16) between a sail boat and a power boat.

Tomorrow we may try to get past a set of passes that must be timed with the currents. Our final plan depends on weather and how the systems perform.