Visit to Paraty and Another Grumble

1667 to 1844

Nuked Up Angra

18 August 2012

I decided to make my visit to Paraty yesterday, a Friday, instead of Monday. 

I started walking just after 9 AM wearing my straw sombrero from Mexico that had survived the passage from La Paz intact.  Thirty minutes later I was at the bus stop and 20 minutes after that I was on the bus.  The fare turned out to be $R9.50 instead of the $R2.60 to Angra, and I came to see why – Paraty is much farther away than Angra.  We arrived sometime before noon, which I figured would give me a good 3 hours for a look around.

I saw two Information with Internet places across the street from the station and I figured that they were commercial operations.  I walked into the one at the left and nobody spoke English and they charged me one Real for a small map of the town measuring 6” x 8”.  It didn't take me long to find the “Centro Historico” and the water front.

The Centro Historico is chained off with limited access to traffic.  Being a Friday in the off season the town was remarkably quiet.  I took some videos of the natural harbor and boating facilities.  The near side was filled with tourist boats.  On the far side I could see slips with some sail boats in them.  Nevertheless the entire area, including the approaches to the harbor, appeared to be very shallow and I was glad that I had visited by bus.

I spent a couple of hours walking around and photographing. Toward the end I heard a couple speaking English and they turned out to be English, visiting Brazil for one of their children's wedding.  They told me a bit about Rio and I told them about the cataratas at Iguazu, which they plan to visit. 

At 3 PM I decided to return to Bracui, and on the way out I found the banks and tried my luck with my Visa card at Bradesco, with no luck.  I could not see and HSBC bank around.  After a 30 minute wait I was on the bus back to Bracui and on the way saw signs that indicated a nuclear power station.  I took a quick photo of it from the bus as we rushed by.  I must admit that the well sheltered bay of Angra Dos Reis is a great place for such a plant.

I had envisioned several visits to Paraty, but for me one was enough. The old precinct is interesting and well worth a visit, but for me it didn't have the impact that I had expected.  I thought about that and concluded that Mexico had spoiled me, with its broad sweep of antiquity, much of it still alive and functioning naturally.  I found Paraty to be a tiny precinct, highly commercial, and more like a theme park than a real place, which was fine with me, but for one visit only. 

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This morning I found the battery bank to be down to 12.0V.  I hit the “start” button of the engine and after about a second everything died.  I had been noticing lately that the starter bank has been dropping voltage throughout the day as though it has been joined with the house bank.  This should not be because the Voltage Sensitive Relay (VSR) is supposed to isolate the starter bank when it drops below 12.8V.  I used the combiner switch to yield a bank of 6 large batteries at 12.0V and started the engine with no trouble.    There could be a problem with the VSR, and I plan to do some snooping around next week.  In the meantime, I'll manually switch off the starter bank when the engine is not running to make sure that it is physically isolated from the house bank.  (I'll see if the VSR circumvents the isolator switch.)

It appears that running the engine an hour or 80 minutes a day is not sufficient, so from now on I'll do 2-hour runs until I get the batteries well charged.  [Note: I found out later why the batteries had been so drained: I had accidentally flipped the refrigerator thermostat to "high" and the compressor must have run continuously to turn the refrigerator into one large freezer. That thermostat is in a very vulnerable spot and I must put a guard over it because this has happened before.]

How I miss the electrical setup of the old SABB engine!  I had frequently seen the Balmar delivering the full 160 amps into the house bank, knowing that the smaller alternator was delivering another 18 amps to the starter bank.  The alternator on the Volvo engine is rated at 115 Amps which I was not that happy about when we planned the installation but I accepted it because I figured that would get me by.  In fact I've never seen it deliver more than 70 amps, and during my 1500 RPM charging runs it delivers about 50 amps .  (If I heard right, its output is related to RPM.) This translates to many more engine hours to keep the batteries charged, and more precious fuel during a long passage.  During charging runs I am forced to run the engine at 1500 RPM, otherwise the battery fault alarm will go off; and this puts a lot of strain on the mooring lines.  This “battery fault” hair trigger is  another extremely annoying characteristic of the Volvo setup.

I'll deal with this after I return to Australia.  I'll start off  by discussing the problem with Volvo.  If I do not get sensible help from them I'll go elsewhere and attempt to have the Volvo alternator replaced with the Balmar (which I still have), using the same external regulator as before, which is still mounted in the electrical closet.  I want to totally bypass that bullshit Volvo electrical management system.