FIX A FRIDGE
Dena Hankins and James Lane troubleshoot a faulty fridge on their 30ft yacht by overriding a non-functioning printed circuit board
Bringing ice is an excellent gift for sundowners. Ours is made from the sun and wind because we are an electric sailboat: desalinating our own drinking water and then freezing it into cubes and novelty balls, requiring not a drop of fuel anywhere in the process. We consider this about as righteous as it gets –ice made from the sun is better than any other kind!
One day recently, a queasy humid warmth met James’s questing hand when he reached into the refrigerator box. In the tropics, icy cold water had kept us hydrated and motivated and we’d made heavy use of the fridge. In the cool winter of Terceira Island in the Azores, the fridge held mostly condiments, juices, and the brilliant Azorean butter and cheese.
Consternation was the dominant emotion aboard Cetacea. We did an emergency cold-food-ectomy on the refrigerator box, moving all of the contents to a friend’s land fridge. Okay, so, off the grid but not so out-of-the-loop. That fortuitous and unusual opportunity provided us with the time to dig deep and diagnose our problem. At sea, we may have managed most of these diagnostic steps but it’s doubtful we would have saved the cheese.
Now, modern living aside, refrigeration is optional. We sailed from San Francisco to Hawaii in the autumn of 2006 in a Gulf 32 pilothouse sloop without going to great lengths to cool the icebox past the first few days. The utility of actual refrigeration revealed itself once we got into waters too warm for using the hull as a chiller, and we’ve grown used to a certain ease of living aboard that comes with trustworthy cold goods. We wanted to resuscitate the system if we could.
We never considered looking for a refrigerator technician. We rarely allow anyone to work on our boat systems. It’s the Dena and James team with Beluga Greyfinger, the boat cat, supervising. In one memorable instance, our watermaker (a real trouper and a lot tougher than most folks are privy to) started blowing the circuit breaker. We chased that fault down the rabbit hole of disassembly until the naked motor was still tripping that breaker… and then we did an oil change on it to be sure we had to take it to a professional. ACovid-19-era masked bus ride to an electric motor shop in the middle of nowhere (Massachusetts) revealed that it needed a deep cleaning of the windings. It’s been working perfectly ever since.
