Las Palmas, Gran Canaria
The ODA diary
Erik L. Roede
Sat 28 Sep 2013 15:21
The end of the first leg of our journey. We leave ODA here for a month and return to Norway by plane to do necessary chores. This is also the starting line for the ARC+ cruising rally across the Atlantic Ocean via the Cape Verde islands.
We've had our first major incident here: The gearbox, actually the flywheel damper, gave out. Lucky it happened here where help and parts could possibly be obtained. With only a week till start, we had a major problem. The solution turned out to be our friend Thorleif back in Norway, a diesel engine genious. Thorleif jumped on a plane the next morning and promptly climbed into the engine room. The next five days were spend lifting up the engine, removing the gearbox, replacing the flywheel damper (amazingly there is a well-stocked Volvo Penta shop in the marina and we got parts flown in from Madrid as needed every morning) and rebuilding a leaky seawater pump. He also discovered that three of the four engine mounts were completely sheared off! A potentially dangerous situation which we are very fortunate that he found. A bit more work, but despite only having the tools we have on board, Thorleif had that engine back in perfect working order in time for start.
Not only that, Thorleif decided not to go home, but is staying on board for the crossing! We were also joined by my sister Kathrine and our friend Carsten from Norway and Francois from Iceland, so we are six on board: Kathrine, Francois, Carsten, Thorleif, Tobias and me.
Finally the starting gun was fired at 1 pm on November 10 and off we sailed together with the 49 other boats in this year's ARC+.