04/01/09  More  Bora Bora

Saturday we  had what can only be described as a bad toilet day. It began when the aft head ‘s vacuum pump wouldn’t shut down., followed closely by the day head joining in.  It was decided  that four of us would abandon ship while Steve looked into the problem.  In the process he decided to loosen the hose clip on the air vent pipe from the holding tank and before he could react quickly enough , the pipe blew off covering him in extremely nasty smelly stuff. He also found a small leak in one of the toilet’s bellows unit which has been giving off an unpleasant aroma.

Eventually he worked out what the problem was.  The holding tank gauge has always been unreliable even though we have changed more than once.  A couple of weeks ago the tank overflowed up into the carbon air filter in the vent pipe. It must have left a sediment which went solid and effectively  blocked the vent pipe. The day before the disaster he thought he had emptied the tank but because of the blocked vent pipe it didn’t actually happen, consequently the over-running of the vacuum pumps built up a huge back pressure which exploded in Steve’s face. After gargling with Vodka he recovered, and  the system is now back to normal, although the aft head has a small occasional leak on the freshwater intake side.  Steve installed the last of our 130 Euro air filters and we are now paranoid about emptying the tank as often as possible. The boat smells sweeter than ever. Steve’s new motto is “Never work on a toilet system with your mouth open.”

Saturday evening we had our obligatory dinner at “Bloody Mary’s.”  Ellen left for London  Monday evening and won’t get to home until Wednesday morning.

The Gods were obviously very sad to see her go as today is seriously rainy and grey. Like monsoon rainy.

Last night we were just finishing our dinner when we heard a big crash a couple of hundred meters away.  Steve instinctively, grabbed the spot light in time to catch a speed boat t-boning a second yacht at anchor.  He and Demetri jumped in the dinghy to see if help was needed.  The driver of the speed boat was local, in his 50s/60s, possibly drunk and had been thrown through his windscreen severely slicing his arm.  Steve sped to the Yacht Club to alert them while Demetri and Justin, the  skipper  from CHESHIRE CAT loaded the injured man in the other dinghy and while Demetri was supported his badly injured  arm, took him to shore.  Demetri was quite shaken by the experience. The driver was taken to hospital immediately; He had hit the first boat and in panic reversed off it, sped around in a circle and hit the second yacht riding up almost on its deck.  The first yacht was holed above the waterline and the second had much less serious damage although from our boat it looked like it had impaled the yacht.  Steve went back and took some snaps for the yacht which had been hit. The speedboat began to sink but a harbour ship arrived to time to tow it away. This all happened under a nearly full moon.

On a more jolly note, I enclose some shots of the ritual fish feeding here in Bora Bora.

Accident Update:

Justin just dropped by.  He has been to the hospital to check on the driver and learned that he had been airlifted immediately to Papeete and within an hour was undergoing micro-surgery.  His arm had nearly been severed, and he lost a huge amount of blood.  Had he not been taken off so quickly he would have lost his arm. The American couple of the yacht  were only concerned about the damage to their boat and did  nothing to assist even though he was  bleeding profusely and obviously seriously injured.  They even tried to prevent his removal before the police came.

In the small world department, Justin  was skipper of PILAR G at the beginning of the Millennium Odyssey we did 10 years ago, although he had some differences with the owners and was replaced early on.  We have also run into MISS MUFFET from the same rally with new owners, a new name but the old T-Shirts.