We left the marina last Sunday, keeping an eye out for any further oily discharge from the engine and on the coolant water level. Two hours out and the discharge, albeit small, reappeared. We put into Chalong bay, anchored up and investigated. The oil was nothing to do with the sea water pump but coming from behind the bottom pulley wheel on the front of the engine - the end of the crankshaft! Fearing more weeks in the marina I emailed photographs to the engineers and corresponded with yachties who are engineers. Apparently it is standard practice on marine engines to be able to change the front crankshaft seal (or perhaps I mean the pulley shaft seal) externally. So I did get a few minutes sleep that night. The next day we had two engineers on board and it took them about an hour to replace the seal, suspecting corrosion around the edge of the old seal from being left in the heat and humidity for so long. Whilst here they checked the engine temperature and for coolant leaks but both were normal. They also cleaned up the pulley wheels because there had been a lot of dust from belt wear. This was probably due to rust on the wheels but led to a wider discussion about alternators and battery charging. I had replaced our three bank batteries with higher capacity ones (120Ah each). What I hadn’t appreciated is that the capacity of the alternator should be 25% of the battery amp hours. 25% of 360 is 90Amps and our alternator is 80Amps. If you add in the starter motor battery at 75Ah we should in theory have an alternator capacity of up to 110Amps. What this means is that when our batteries are low the alternator will be working hard to provide enough output and this can lead to resistance that could cause extra belt wear. In practice this is only likely to be an issue if the batteries need a lot of charging. Most of the time they should be kept full by the solar panels and Duogen. The biggest drain on our batteries is usually when sailing with all the instruments, autopilot and radar on and without the Duogen providing a strong output in water turbine mode. We will need to be careful to manage our consumption to minimise battery draw and wear on the alternator belt. Craig at C&C engineering still recommends replacing our pulley wheels and toothed belt with the now fitted by Yanmar wider flat belt and corresponding pulley wheels when we get back to Europe. We could even source the parts when back in the UK from Seychelles and fit them in the Seychelles. In anticipation of this Craig sold me a pulley wheel for the alternator as there is not a standard Yanmar part and the hub of which will need to be machined to the required width when fitted with the new belt and the other two pulleys.

On our engine we have an integral 230V generator that feeds into a mains circuit. This is the circuit that the shore power cable plugs into and includes a battery charger. It is possible (I think) that the generator could provide a charge for the batteries that would make up for any undercharging from the alternator.

And now a digression from boat matters. A small lump on my face that has appeared since we have been out here was beginning to look a little suspicious. A call to the local hospital resulted in a following day appointment and biopsy. The result has now been phoned through and it is a Squamous Cell Carcinoma. You may recall I had the same issue in Australia with one removed from the back of my hand. I can only reiterate the importance of not spending too much time in the sun, the use of high SPF suncream and daily high SPF face moisturiser and wearing a hat as a matter of course. I am going to buy each of my sons a Tilley hat. Annie and I each have one and they are recommended by a dermatologist I saw back in Bristol. We have come across this issue with several other similar aged yachties so please let me be a lesson to you all. Yesterday we went back to the hospital to have the remaining lump removed. We saw the same child prodigy doctor as last time who proceeded to put the fear of God into me about where the lump was located, the potential consequences and the available treatments. One of the treatments involved going to a specialist unit in Bangkok and having a Moh’s procedure under which progressively larger sections are removed until a standby pathologist pronounces that all the affected area has been removed. Beam me up Scotty. We opted to have a discussion with the surgeon who could, as an alternative, remove a relatively large section in the hope of catching everything. He was much older, more confident and with a smile said it was “only” a Squamous cell carcinoma that he could remove with a wide margin and depth. The procedure was much quicker but a little more brutal than I had expected. After he had finished the surgeon reassured me about the margin he had taken (I could see this from what was in the specimen bottle) and with another smile exhorted me to “go sailing”. The histology result will be sent through while we are on passage to the Maldives and we will pick it up when we arrive.

After the hospital we went to the nearby Central shopping mall where there is a Covid PCR test centre. We need a negative test within 72hrs of our departure in order to be allowed into the Maldives and the result came through this morning, less than 18 hours later. It is “nothing detected” that I take to mean negative, given that we were congratulated on the result! We also picked up our new freezer that I was persuaded to go with when discovering that it is light weight, 12V and draws only 2.9 Amps. Annie further convinced me when she started to muse on how old our fridge is and what we’d do if that broke down… the freezer could also operate as a fridge. We set it going in the car with a bag of ice to reduce battery consumption back on Vega and overnight it seemed to be using about 2.5Amps when running. This means that with the fridge on at the same time we are using about 5Amps. Our two solar panels produce about 4.5Amps each in full, direct sunlight (a rare occurrence!). The Duogen in wind mode has a variable output depending upon the strength of the wind and here it is only in the stronger gusts that it works and we get up to 3Amps from it. So, it’s unlikely we will be able to fully recharge the batteries after they have run down overnight without a boost from the engine but they are going down slowly (97% still this morning) and maintaining around 12.7V output during the day.

We have now run our new water maker for the first time. Wow, it produces over a litre a minute (75 litres per hour). It is easy to set up and operate and when it is running I can sit back and think of all those endless trips ashore to fill the water containers that we now won’t have to make!

Notwithstanding our boat and medical issues we have still been enjoying the company of friends, meals ashore under the trees with a wonderful sunset backdrop. On Saturday as Annie and I headed off to the hospital Endorphin and Hecla set sail for the Maldives. We plan to head off on Tuesday and to catch up in Uligan. However, when we arrived back at the bay there was Endorphin at anchor again and a message to say that when sailing downwind they had experienced too much movement in their rudder stock as each wave pushed against the rudder and they are going back into the marina for repair, modification or reinforcement as appropriate. Given the shallow depths in the long marina approach channel they will be in the marina for a week until the next sufficiently high tide to get out again. There are endless blogs about the joys of sailing around the world and for the most part the experience is wonderful - beautiful bikini clad crew draped over the deck, endless sunshine, idyllic anchorages, pristine white sand beaches. However, there is also a lot of stress, frustration, adversity and fear and it is this that is also part of the overall sense of achievement at the end of a passage. This is why it is the combination of Annie’s and my blogs that will give you the truest sense of what we are actually experiencing.

On passage to the Maldives I will post our position daily and include any highlights we have to report on.