Friday September 20^th   2013, Sea of Timor,  North of Australia   12.19.5S  130:22.8E  

Today's Blog by David (Time zone BST +8.50; UTC +9.5)

With apologies for the radio silence, the crew have been enjoying Darwin, well as far as it is possible to actually enjoy Darwin anyway. Separate Blog on out excursions and a report on the Serendipity Crew Golf Day follows in the next day or so.

Our shore based activities were combined with a fair bit of maintenance and provisioning since it will be pretty much three months now before reach  South Africa, the next stop at which reliable yacht services can be sourced.

Maintenance activities take various forms.  Necessary, Timely and Nice to have.

Necessary

Some nasty banging in the steering foretold some Necessary maintenance.  It transpired that the top rudder bearing had seized leading  in time to the rudder stock unscrewing itself from the retaining locking nut.  It could have fallen out of the boat (rudder and rudder stock) leaving us with no steering (which wouldn’t have been too much of a problem because we would soon have sunk as water came in the hole!) had it not been designed to  hang on a skeg and been held in place by the bottom bearing.  

The short story here is that Eddie (one of the Oyster Rally support team) knew how to fix it, told us by email how to do some passage sticking plaster and on arrival  in Darwin  he  fixed it for us.  It will last a while until a new bearing can be fitted.

Timely

In this category lies the normal routine stuff that has to be done every month or so. Batteries, engine, generator, steering, easing the cocks and  a whole list of other things that have to get done. Timely?, because if we don’t do, it something big will go wrong sometime and will ruin our day. …….  and they take time.

Nice to Have

There are things that you live with – things you know need to be done but one really can’t be bothered to deal with…..  One of these was in the forward heads where it was clear that a Joker Valve needed to be replaced. This valve stops the stuff that has been pumped out of the heads (aka ‘the toilet’) from flowing back into the bowl down the pipe.  Changing this valve is not hard - but not much fun. Terry was ‘up for it’ and decided to give it a “full service”.   The job took maybe an hour after which  he tested it and we went ashore for dinner. 

The following morning, things were not looking good. While everything seemed to be operational,  the bowl would not empty …… however nicely one asked! It was clear that there was a blockage in the pump out pipe. We tried a small drain clearing tool we have but that wasn’t going to work. Eventually we decided we would have to replace the relevant section of pipe - the difficult part being that the pipe is  routed out of sight,  threaded through various inaccessible fittings.

I asked Eddie (I think you will hear more of him!). He suggested using rigging wire as a guide pushing it through as we extracted the old pipe then pushing the new pipe along the wire.     Well – wrestling a four metre length of loo pipe in a confined space, one that you know to be blocked and have no real idea what may be behind the blockage ………..but you and the audience are certain you will soon find out…………… is the stuff of a Whitehall Farce.  Hence my  suggestion above to Terry.

As it happens, getting the pipe out and the new one in was much easier than we feared.    Clearing up afterwards ……. in the “altogether” ……. is another story …. altogether. Boom Boom!

We ENJOY sailing, Yes WE DO!!!