Communications and Power

I walked over to Action Yachting chandlery just off the end of my jetty yesterday and asked if they sold telephone cards.  I was told that they used to but did not sell them any more.  I asked the young chap where I could buy them and he went to the back office to ask.  The manager of came out and told me where I could purchase them on Adderley Street.  When he learned that I would be walking he told me that he would get his driver to get them for me in the afternoon.  I told him that I didn't mind walking but he insisted and I thanked him very much.  Twenty minutes later I was back in the chandlery with ZAR600 in cash and a note requesting ZAR500 in international cards and ZAR100 in domestic cards.

The manager came out and when he saw the amount of money I wanted to put into the phone cards he got an unhappy look and said that there must be a cheaper way.  Soon we were talking with a man who had used a dongle which he plugged into his laptop via a USB port and which would connect into the internet via the mobile telephone network.  This was precisely the system that had worked so well for me in La Paz.  I agreed with the proposition and the manager told me to return to the shop just before closing time at 5.30 PM.  I asked him if he needed more money and he smiled and said No.

At 5.30 PM the dongle was waiting for me.  It had cost ZAR400 and they purchased ZAR200 worth of service.  Proof of identity was required for the purchase but fortunately they accepted the information on my identity provided by the driver.  The dongle came with the sim card already installed and has 3GB of storage capacity on board.  I plugged in the dongle, the appropriate driver was installed by the Win7 OS, then the software installation wizard came up and in no time I was connected to the internet.  I have made Skype calls from the comfort of my boat to the USA and Australia with outstanding performance.  As far as I am concerned my communications problems are over.

This afternoon before leaving for a walk into town for some food shopping I decided on the spur of the moment to try to connect the boat to shore power.  Fortunately I had cleared out the port quarter berth in order to dry and clean the area and found the cable stowed underneath.  The plug that I had purchased at Action Yachting a few days earlier was smaller than the one I had used in Brazil, but was of the exact same design, so swapping over required minimal effort, given that the wires were already cut and bared to the correct length.

After cleaning the male plug blades on the cockpit bulkhead with sandpaper I plugged in the cable then went to the dock and plugged into shore power.  There was no electrical explosion so I went into the boat and plugged my workshop lamp into one of the 240V wall plugs and the light came on.  Then came the big test.  In Brazil the 220V system had not been enough to drive the 60 amp Mastervolt charger hard wired into the boat and I had been forced to use what weak power I could get from shore using extension cords, and of course the batteries were not being charged.  I was hoping that SA's true 230V system (as opposed to Brazil's 2-phase 110V) would provide enough grunt to activate the Mastervolt.  I switched on the Mastervolt and it came alive and I noted from my DC meter that it was delivering 28 amps of power into the boat's batteries. 

So now I have unlimited electrical power from either the boat's 240V wall outlets or the boat's 12V battery bank.  The refrigerator will now stay on all of the time, and I'll now power the computers via the 240V outlets rather than 12V inverters.  My electrical problems are over.

2 out of 2 big wins in one day was very satisfying, and with that I went for my walk into the city