12:02.34N  61:45.47W

 

Friday 7 to Sunday 9 February 2014

 

Friday was Independence Day in Grenada and therefore a public holiday and Palm Tree Marine managed to get the remaining work completed on the windlass by Thursday night where it was nicely locked in their workshop.  We didn’t want to wait until Monday to get the windlass back and fortunately Mike, being English and not much caring about the holiday, came in on Friday so I could get hold of the offending article.

 

 

 

It was rebuilt and repainted although paint had been sprayed on to the bolts which I attacked with a wire brush so that I had a chance of getting the nuts back on:-

 

 

 

 

 

All shiny bright and raring to go:-

 

 

 

 

We refitted it without too much difficulty then reconnected the wiring and lowered and raised the anchor as a test.  All working fine so I did a quick check of the wiring.  My new connections were warm but elsewhere the wiring was distinctly hot.  This is not good anyway but as the wiring is in a sail locker the sails can catch fire (we once had a hole burnt in one sail due to poor wiring).  Oh by jove.  I played around remaking some connections but needed to get some more connectors man enough for the job so we abandoned for the day.  I emailed my brother David who is a star with electrickery to find out what I should be looking at and got some great advice as usual, not all of it rude.

 

Most of Saturday was spent shopping, Lin on one bus to the supermarket and me on another going into St George’s to various electrical shops.  Once we returned it was pouring down so we couldn’t work on the windlass.

 

On Sunday I stripped back four connections and found the culprit.  I think when the anchor chain jammed the windlass was working hard and things got hot and some of the wiring around a main connector had gone hard.  I re-made the connections and once we tested everything was cool in every sense. 

 

On a lighter note, Staron, one of the marina staff did some diving to check the pontoons and came up smiling and shouting ‘look, look, baby lobster’.  He looked so happy which was surprising since they see these things all the time.

 

 

 

A happy Staron:-

 

 

 

 

 

A closer look:-

 

 

 

Staron did tell us he was going to put the lobster back so it could grow.