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By: George Reiswig - 8/2002
From Skagway, we took the ferry to Haines, where I am writing this tonight. Fred and Jane are supposed to get to Haines tomorrow, the 21st of August. They have had some problems of their own, from what we can tell from the cursory e-mails we've exchanged with them. Their water pump pulley broke, somehow, and they ended up waiting for a couple of days for a welder to attempt repair. It wobbles, from what they say, and may not hold together long. Does this begin to sound like a trip down the river Styx to you? As though demons have possessed our vehicles and are even now plotting new evil against us?
In Skagway, on Charlie's last day with us prior to leaving on the ferry for Oregon, we decided to do a short trail. As we started out of town toward the trail, a whine alerted us to the fact that our batteries were not being charged.
Nooooo!
Fortunately, it was an easy fix... a loose fuse tightened up, and voila! Everything is charging. Our trail, however, had been closed off when a glacial moraine gave way four weeks earlier, sending a 12-foot-high wall of mud and debris down the canyon and doing away with all evidence of a trail. Tempting, sore tempting it was to drive over the earthen dam that the dozer had placed in our path. Heck, a flood might just make the trail more interesting, right? I drove up the earthen berm, then backed down... best not to break the law at this point.
Then, as we pulled back into town, we started to smell sulfur. Huh... must be some hot springs in the area or something. But when we stopped, there was a hissing sound, too... and the farther we got from the vehicle, the less sulfur smell there was. I assumed I had picked up a nail in a tire, and started looking for that. Angela was first to spot the real source -- the batteries were boiling.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Yes, our voltage regulator had conked out. We had been charging our four Optima batteries at 18 volts for some time without knowing it. They still work, and I can still run the engine without lights and so forth without draining the batteries, but we'll have this to fix too before we head home. Haines DOES have a NAPA....
What demons await our intrepid travelers on the next leg of their journey? Tune in soon to find out!
From Haines... well, we don't know yet. All of us have had our confidence shaken. For now, we're holed up in a bed and breakfast in Haines, since a gale is sweeping across the southern coast of Alaska with 70 MPH winds and heavy rain, neither of which even when taken by themselves are fun to camp in. Taken together...
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
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