Thursday 22 and Friday 23 September 2011

 

Distance Run 7 Miles

 

 

After motoring over to Sopromar's waiting pontoon at Lagos Marina on Thursday we met John Holloway to discuss the jobs we needed doing once we are back in the water.  His face dropped when he learnt how much we wanted done.  My face dropped when I learnt that John was retiring and running down his work.  He was more than happy to advise and to help plan the circuits and make any difficult connections with his equipment but was encouraging owners to do the bulk of the jobs.  This is good for me but will be a test of my limited practical skills!  I don't want to take the work elsewhere as John has such a good reputation which we have found to be justified.

 

Sopromar lifted the boat at 11am on Friday and lowered the rudder to inspect the job.  We offered up the new bearings to the rudder stock.  These are of a new type and have needle bearings on the inside in order to help prevent the bearing binding to the stock.  This is a common Bavaria problem but not one we have had on our boat.  Unfortunately the play between the new bearing and the stock was greater than with the bearing we took off!  Sopromar are convinced the new bearing would be at least as noisy as the old one.  This certainly seems possible and we decided they would modify the old bearing by inserting a sleeve to create a tighter fit - so long as they agree to lift us again at their cost and fit my new bearings if the this doesn't work.  They agreed but can't start the work until Monday.

 

Mon and Nev arrive tomorrow for a weeks holiday.  They have rented a two bedroom apartment so we can stay with them and spend some time together.  This means we will only have tonight on the boat on the hard.  This is never fun as you have to access the boat by ladder which is tedious but also a little risky.  We never like it and Mon and Nev's arrival couldn't have come at a better time (which is how they planned it!).

 

We have asked Sopromar to look at the heat exchanger on the engine as we think it is part of our continuing engine overheating problems (I have been in touch with a Volvo engineer in the UK who suspects this and in any case advises we have the exchanger cleaned as it has done 1500 hours service).  We were going to have this done once we were back in the water but as there will be delay on relaunching and we will be staying at the apartment in the evenings next week we have asked Sopromar to do this whilst we are out of the water.