A Stimulating Day
Ile Jeudi
Bob and Lin Griffiths
Fri 14 Sep 2012 17:12
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Friday 14 September 2012
I had broken a tooth when in Madeira and decided
to defer seeing a dentist until Lanzarote so there would be time for more
than one visit if necessary. Fortunately there was one a bike ride away
in Playa Blanca who could see me today. Before leaving I rang the
boatyard to see whether they are able to re-gas fridges as ours had been
playing up for a couple of weeks. They can, they have the correct gas and
can do it this afternoon and would telephone when they were due to come!
With the day set up nicely I rode off to Playa
Blanca to the dentist. A quick inspection showed that a crown was
needed. 'Just three visits should do it' so I was glad we would be here
for a month. The dentist was multi-tasking and trotted between me and her
other treatment room and dealt with 3 other victims during the two
hours I was pinned to the chair.
I texted Lin as I was leaving to let her know I had
been longer than expected, unlocked the bike and rode of for something soft for
lunch. After a few moments I realised I had left my smartphone on a
wall outside the dentist so dashed back to get it. Gone. I saw a guy
striding off nearby so I quickly locked the bike again and ran off
after him. Too late. I'm not sure what I was going to do if I had
caught him as he hadn't stolen the phone so much as 'found' it but I thought I
might have found a way of 'thanking' him for finding it for me. I
spent the next twenty minutes looking out for men of a similar description who
might have been using a Galaxy SII to no avail. Dark haired
men, wearing white t-shirts - are not rare in these parts!
I went to the local phone shop to ask if anyone
had come in asking for a charger for a Samsung but no luck there
either.
I rode back to the boat to confess my
stupidity to Lin and called my mobile number to try to speak to the current
holder. Not available. I then called the yard to arrange for the
fridge work. They explained they had telephoned twice and got no answer
but could come now and do it which they promptly did!
All seemed to go well with the fridge until a
couple of hours later when Lin noticed various control lights flashing
to warn there was an electrical fault. Whilst inspecting the
wiring I noticed a burning smell. Not good. Further poking around
revealed the wiring connections for the fridge fan had been made (6 years ago)
by poking in a couple of bare wires on to the terminals. These had
been disturbed by the technicians when they were doing the gassing this
afternoon and had shorted. This was not their fault, the fan should have
been connected properly and the bare wires were unexpected and out of
sight. Unfortunately this had damaged the PCB in the control unit hence
the light show. So the fridge was now re-gassed but no longer
working. Time to turn it off and run down the contents until a
solution can be found.
The PCB. The black square area with soldered
blobs towards the top right of the circuit board should be green like the
rest!
 I then rode back into Playa Blanca to get a new SIM
card for an old phone I had on board. The helpful lady checked my recently
topped up credit and confirmed it had run out as the new keeper
of my phone had, not surprisingly, helped himself to it. So she cancelled
that SIM card and reinstated my number on a new one. Unfortunately, in the
process she managed to disable Lin's perfectly fine SIM card by mistake so I
ended up buying a new one for her as well.
I rode back to the boat glaring at every dark
haired man wearing a white t-shirt.
A couple of shots of the front at Playa
Blanca:-
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