Next day I got in touch with Ricardo who told me he found Angelos(one of the two welders on the island). Ricardo was on a diving job again, had a ferry from Paros to Athens at 20.15 to fly further to his wife in Rome. He promised to come as soon as posibble and if time was not enough he would change tickets and take the 01.15 ferry instead (incredible !). At 21.00 Ricardo arrived with Angelos. We took the exhaustpipe isolation away and found a large semicircular crack in the mainwelding joint . At first Angelos thought is would be posibble to weld it in place but after 2hrs of work a larger hole was revealed in what Angelos described as "dead metal". The whole pipe had to be taken out!
At 00.30 the pipe was out and Ricardo managed to reach his ferry at 01.15. It was now a fact that I had to remain in this port facing the gale next evening.