Down the hatch!
Rhiann Marie - Round the World
Stewart Graham
Fri 4 Jun 2010 10:45
4th June 1045 Local
0945UTC
Well we have now been home
in Inverness for a few days and have just about got over our jet lag. It is
great to catch up with family, friends and colleagues.
The day we arrived in
Pape'ete in Tahiti Trish and I cleaned the boat. Not of course "cleaned" to the
concours standard that all the professional crews on the yachts surrounding
us on the "superyacht" pontoon in marina Tiana do. They take a Forth Road Bridge
approach to the job in that they reach one end and go
straight
back to the beginning
and start again. Trish and I will not be doing that. We like to keep the boat
smart and tidy and looking good, but we simply do not have the time to endlessly
clean and polish the boat. This is not why we are sailing round the world. We
prefer to use the time to explore, fish, dive or snorkel and meet people at
the diverse and wonderful places we are visiting. Also when we have a
chance where we can hire a couple of local people we are happy to pay them to
bring our polishing back up to scratch.
And so it was on the day
we arrived in Tahiti that we were berthed on the superyacht dock with all
the other professionally fully crewed boats (we were the only boat on the
superyacht dock that was sailed by its owners!) and were washing the boat down.
There was parrot fish scales, mahi mahi blood and guts, my blood, stains from
coconut husks and so on to be scrubbed out of the boat and we wanted at least to
get the worst of it off. I was going forward and had all the hatches
opened, replacing some circlips on them. Our bikes and sails were out of
the sail locker and I was going to take a photograph of our damaged genoa sheets
for the boat builder to see and bloody hell - there was no deck under me!
Straight down the toilet hatch I stepped! First my right knee banged against the
right hand side of the deck opening then my left hip (which is now bruised
and cut from above knee to hip!) then the open hatch itself caught me across the
stomach, bruising me there and folded me in two almost banging my head into the
deck. Realising what a plonker I had been as I went down the hatch I managed to
restrain my screams of pain lest I would attract attention to my plight and
my stupidity from all these crews on the superyachs all around us. So extracting
myself from the deck I hobbbled to the cockpit and down below where I could let
out a muffled scream of agony without anybody realising it was anything more
than an afternoon sexual exploit in the aft cabin. Far less embarrassing than
falling down a hatch you see.
Anyway the reason for telling you all this is that while cleaning, I
discovered a severely cracked stainless steel structural davit support! I
couldn't believe it. I had a real feeling on our last passage that something
could go wrong and it is now clear how close we were to having a major issue at
sea when we would have lost a davit and our RIB. Normally when we go to sea I
arrange to mount our RIB (which as you know is a TLA) on the davits with the
engine end (and therefor 75% of the weight) to the expected windward
side.For some strange reason on this
passage I had not done that, perhaps because it was only a couple of hundred
miles, and the "light end was on the cracked davit. This was extremely fortunate
or I am sure we would have lost the davit. Phew! That was a close
one.
So while I am at home relaxing at work there is I hope a lot of work
going on aboard the boat to repair these davits and also to get a bunch of
warranty work done, so hopefully we are in tip top condition when we go back on
the 15th.
If I can find time over the weekend in among all the essential
socialising I will start to post photos on the
blog......