Pithos Cove

Scott-Free’s blog
Steve & Chris
Mon 10 Aug 2009 15:00
Monday 10th August 2009
 
We stayed in Pithos Cove for a lazy day of swimming and relaxation - and stripping down a winch to find why it had seized!  During our sail yesterday, the port primary winch had jammed in one direction, and we had had to use the secondary winch instead.  Given that we had serviced all the winches in the winter, we were a bit surprised by this, however when we got it apart and found that two of the pawl springs had broken we were less so - we had been unable to replace these as we could not get hold of spares (they are Dutch made Enkes winches and Enkes have gone out of business!) so we had cleaned them up and reused them.  The springs are tiny compared to the size of the winch, and it was small pieces of them that had got between the teeth of the cogs and made them seize. The only thing we could do was to get them apart,clean them up and replace the springs with the slightly smaller Lewmar ones we have on board.
 
                                           
One of the culprits - the bottom arm snapped off and jammed the cogs                                A naked winch and a semi-naked Steve! 
 
We put the winch back together and tested it- it worked fine now in the direction it had not been working in, but now it wouldn't work in the opposite direction!  It turned out that the other two pawl springs had also snapped.  So we had to replace them too.  The winch is now working fine, but we wonder why all four springs failed at the same time.  It just proves what we were told about the cruising life - it's all about mending boats in lovely places!
 
We rowed ashore in the evening to walk along the path into the little village about 1km away.  As we were looking at the taverna menu, Steve recognised a boat tied alongside the jetty and at the same time June and Geoff appeared on Concerto.  It is always good to see familiar faces and we exchanged stories and then decided to have dinner together.  The food was unremarkabke but the company was good - so good in fact that it was 1a.m. before we realised it and we still had to walk back to the cove!  Needless to say we were not up early the next day!