With lots of help from Ramone on Monday I was able to remove and remount the four defective solar panels on the starboard side. The replacements were not exactly the same. First, the cells themselves are clearly different, the new cells looking black where the original panels were more of a navy blue as you can see in the picture. Then they are laminated more completely than the previous panels which made them a little bit larger so we ended up with a small overlap between two of the panels on top of the dodger, but they seem very secure. And the connection boxes on the panels are placed a little differently so the white boxes we had to protect the wires from wayward toes don't quite fit. One of them we managed to make work, but Ramone is trying to fabricate three others. And then finally the replacement panels also have a different cell protector so the wiring was more time consuming and I didn't complete that until yesterday. Hopefully Ramone will have the finished boxes today and we can call the job complete, having replaced three of the four panels on the starboard side. It started raining about an hour after we finished on Monday, there were a few squalls on Tuesday and a pretty good rain last night. There is no evidence of any water coming below so it looks like the wiring is well sealed.
We'll wait until we return to Shelter Bay next month to swap out the port side. Now, on to our more mundane commissioning tasks so that we hope we can actually depart for San Blas by Saturday.
