I love the sound of breaking glass...
Rhiann Marie - Round the World
Stewart Graham
Tue 25 Jan 2011 03:50
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Sorry but I have lost track of which day or date it
is, but it is the day after the date on the last blog. I will confirm for sure
tomorrow.
The time however definitely is 1103 Local 0303
UTC
Still sitting at anchor of Kuah town. Here's
why....
When I got up in the morning after our bumpy last
night of passage from Singapore I checked around the boat. It is also normal to
do this on passage and I regularly go forward checking everything is OK in each
cabin. However it seems that on our forward guest cabin heads the
4mm countersunk allen screws holding the tempered glass shower door in
place had started working loose. Not surprising after all that slamming since
Bali. Obviously in between my last check and arriving in Langkawi one had
fallen out alltogether.
The whole door was lying at a crooked angle and all
the glass shower enclosure had worked loose. Going ashore yesterday I thought I
would search around and find a replacement for the missing screw so I took one
more from the door as a sample. The anchorage is completely enclosed in flat
shallow water and I thought the door was sufficiently braced in place till I got
back with the screw.
I was chuffed that I had found some of these
stainless steel screws in town and came back in the dark of late evening before
going to bed to realign the door and fix it all in
place.
When I looked forward I was horrified to see
shattered shards of toughened safety glass everywhere. I guess some of the
longtails heading past us came all too close and caused Rhiann Marie to roll
around in the swell. This caused the door to spin out of place and the
glass fixed panel to explode into a million peices, filling the shower tray, the
toilet and the sink as well as everything else.
Ther is more than enough things to do aboard
without me creating more jobs for myself from carelessness. I was mighty pissed
off with myself and I just closed the forward door and went to bed. It was not a
good idea to deal with all of that glass at night and while pegged out (and just
a little demoralised).
I got off an e-mail to Discovery yachts at about
2300 asking for some info on the glass so I could have it re-made in Thailand
and went to bed.
I got up this morning to get stuck into the job and
first picked up our emails from the satellite coms.
Here is what Discovery Yachts had done by the time
I got up in the morning .... On receiving my message they ran up some
drawings of the damaged (shattered in a million pieces) glass. They then drew
the parts in a "jigsaw" type arrangement so it would go in a suitcase and cut it
out of lightweight MDF and shipped it to Gael Force for a friend to take it out
to me this Friday. Bloody hell - now that's service.
Its all the more embarrassing when I think the
problem could have been prevented by me in the first place. I promise to kick
myself up the backside several times today to get my act
together.
Needless to say the first few hours of this morning
were spent picking up millions of pieces of glass with brush and shovel,
fingers, flat of the palm, knees, sole of feet and even forearms. There wasn't a
huge amount of blood but there was a lot of sweat and I don't do tears
anyway unless I am really happy. And I wasn't.
You might say what on earth is glass doing
aboard a boat. But this has crossed oceans and storms and tens of thousands
of miles without problem. It just took one little bit of carelessness by me (at
anchor!) to send it to glass shower door heaven.
You can never stop learning at sea, though
sometimes you may feel like you should start learning.......
Yours truly from a glass impregnated cheesed off
skipper.
p.s. Remember I said I would give you my take on
the Aboriginal situation in Australia? - well at the risk of
being controversial I am going to do that soon. I have thought a lot about
it and read an amazing book called "Why do warriors lie down and
die"
p.p.s To lighten the mood i have added a couple of
contrasting Langkawi images to this blog, however I just noticed that Trish has
gone and called one photograph "Smashing time in the loo" oh for goodness sake
that's all I need - everyone else finding it amusing. And another thing -
yesterday when touring around on my Yamaha scooter we were struggling to
keep our speed up going up a steep hill and the little engine was labouring. I
leaned over my shoulder and cheekily said to Trish we need to shed some
weight from the bike to get to the top of the hill.... three second
silence. Then came the response "well if we throw your ego off we will
fly up the hill".
Today will be spent reinflating my deflated
ego, rebuilding my excessive self confidence and raising my moral to dangerous
levels. After all that I will be ready to haul the anchor in about twenty
minutes.
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