Started New Years eve off with a plan to go ashore and visit the gardens and leave the watermaker and generator running while we were away. We the honda wouldn’t stay running and after my choice to ‘sail’ yesterday instead of make water and electricity I stayed behind to see if I could get the clara johnson started.

Within 30mins I had it running after cleaning up a few things, like the air filter that had disintegrated, and adjusting the fuel cap to keep from getting a fuel lock. Sweet, no or so I thought. Now it wasn’t making the 220volts it was supposed to. Take it back apart and investigate. Downloaded manual from the internet, every option said ‘take to honda dealer’, not exactly sure where one of those is, but I took more things apart, jiggled the connections and sprayed corrosionX on anything that looked questionable. Still no joy.

Okay, gotta make water anyway, fired up the Starboard engine, its producing some power but not what I expected to see, tried increasing the throttle and got a little more. So started the port engine too, and the belts over there were squeaking but producing the charge necessary to run the watermaker pretty well so water, started the water making process. And slowly filling the port tanks at about 8 gallons per hour.

Back to the generator, few more tweaks and still not electricity at the 220v plugs but plenty at the 12v, but not really what I was looking for. A couple more college attempts and put things back together and low and behold magic, I just stuck the volt meter in there and there was the 220v coming out. No, I did not turn it off, I just carried it over and plugged it in. Now making electricity and water as intended, only 1.5 hrs behind the rest of the schedule and missing the gardens.

Oh well, at least I like to tinker with these types of things, I think I’ll replace the squeaky belts next.