The Caribbean Princess was at the pier by 7am this morning. [The photo at left was taken from the Divi Flamingo Resort pier where we try to swim each evening.] There are supposed to be two cruise ships here on Friday and two more on Thursday of next week.

This morning, we had a 30 amp twist lock connector that had a broken screw on one terminal. I like a challenge and decided to see if it could be repaired. It was a ‘challenge’, but the repair was accomplished and I was able to assemble an adapter cable to connect the UPS at the transmitter site. This way it would not be necessary to remove a 30 amp connector from the UPS and have an extended time of outage.

After our noon meal of Japanese chicken and rice, Virginia and I headed to the site. We noticed at least three things while on the way.

First, the Caribbean Princes was already leaving. The cruise ships, we have seen, have always left at sunset.

Second, we noticed there was a ship at Salt Pier. It was the United Tenorio that was here last week! We asked the pier guard where it took the salt. He replied ‘America’. My response that it made a quick trip made him chuckle and say that

the ship had gone out to sea before fully loading due to the rough waves of the past week. It had just now come back to complete loading. I thought I had seen a similar ship (to the United Tenorio) a long distance from shore over the past several days and opined whether it might be another salt ship arriving.

Third, we observed a truck and trailer capable of loading a 20 foot container onto itself at the transmitter site. He was moving the dozen or so containers that WEB, the electric company, has there, by loading them one-at-time, then taking them out to the main road and transferring them onto a truck with a container trailer. As fast as he could load the containers another truck would be there to take it. All the containers were moved in a period of about four hours.

Most of these containers were Aggreko generator sets that WEB had rented to meet the increased power demand for Bonaire before they built their new power plant just south of BOPEC.

At the site, I swapped out the old UPS and installed the new UPS. Everything went smoothly until I started to push the UPS under the lab workbench. The stiff electric cable caused the standard 110 volt plug to ‘pop’ out of its receptacle! [There is a reason a lot of UPS’s use twist lock plugs for the output.] Since the power was already down, I took the extra time needed to ‘safety wired’ the plug into its socket before turning the power back on.

Now it was necessary to check all the transmitter’s automation equipment to see that everything was working. This also included the dial-in remote control feature which, though not working at first, seemed to recover after a few minutes.

It was nearing time for ‘sign on’, so we delayed our departure to make sure the transmitter came on with no ‘glitches’. While waiting, I investigated what was needed to do a couple other projects on my ‘to-do’ list. One is the capability of overriding the photo cell to remotely turn on the tower lights. The other is to shut off the transmitter’s office area air conditioner by a time command and/or remotely. I was able to glean some useful information for both. Hope to have time to implement both.

The transmitter came on fine, so we headed home for a swim. The waves were still a little high, but not dangerously so. It is amazing how refreshing the swim was after not being able for several days.