False Start

Serafina
Rob & Sarah Bell
Tue 14 Jul 2009 18:46
Tuesday 14th July
Exciting night started with a major fuel spill from somewhere which made it
almost unbearable in the boat with the strong fumes coming from the thick
film of diesel on the waters surface that filled the marina. Cannot quite
rid myself of the image of one of the marina staff who was looking at all
this whilst drawing heavily on his lit cigarette. Then around 5.00am we had
another demonstration of how well they do spectacular thunderstorms out
here.

All sorted for a prompt getaway this morning, but discovered that the office
was not going to open until 10am and we needed to return a gismo that gave
us access to free water in return for a 50 Turkish Lira deposit. So we opted
to put the kettle on for a coffee and discovered that the gas solenoid valve
was broken and so no gas. The good news was that we have a spare, but the
bad news was that the old unit was rusted up solid and was not about to come
apart easily. I tried various things and then asked one of the marina staff
who was walking past (he speaks a little English) if there was a gas
engineer we could contact. His response was to pick up the tools and get
stuck into the job himself. He was then joined by a chap who appears to be
the skipper off a new motor yacht that is moored across the pontoon from us,
who has been on nodding terms with us all the time we have been here.

My confidence in this arrangement took several blows as Mustapha (the marina
chap) frequently reached for mole grips and wrenches and seemed fairly rough
and ready in his approach, however in fairness his decision to remove the
entire unit from the boat to work on it on the quay was correct. Once he had
done this he handed everything over to the second chap who has no English at
all, but he seemed very confident and he set about stripping the unit down
so we could replace the solenoid part. This did not go well and as he
produced ever larger wrenches and hammers, I feared that this was going to
end badly. The worst part was when he went back to his boat and reappeared
with an extension lead and an angle grinder with cutting disk! But he
actually knew exactly what he was doing and eventually got everything apart,
cleaned up and then put it all back together on the boat. I merely had to
wire the new one up and all was well. Clearly they do not have any issues
here about gas regulations etc. but this chap tested all the joints
afterwards and refused to accept anything for his work other than our
profuse thanks (although he was clearly very happy with the cans of beer we
put on his rear deck later).

But time had slipped away and it was not worth setting out for our
destination today, so Sarah went into town and I did some work online.

On returning to Serafina I met up with the American owners of two yachts
that have been in and out of the marina whilst we have been here and
following a chat about things, we invited them back for a drink. Martin &
Sandy (Mystique) and Chuck & Alison plus Zoey the dog (Chaliventures III)
came round and we had a great evening mostly with us finding out from them
good places to visit on our way south as well as their experiences on the
East Med Rally and other parts of the world (and Sarah and Sandy bonded over
cockroach stories). They will be wintering at the same marina as us in
October, so there is every chance that we will meet up with them again
during the summer which would be great.