Change of plan...
Starcharger
Mon 2 May 2016 17:04
We are now on Isabella. Our third Island in the Galápagos. Amazing!! And let's face it not a bad place to be....
So...... Where do I begin.....
The generator unfortunately mis behaved again and started shutting down showing an overheat/oil alarm ( this is the second one we have had and as you may recall it was brand new 6 months ago! ) We believed it to be yet another electrical problem as it had both oil and water. So we disconnected the green wire! Within minutes of starting it up again we had what we believed to be smoke billowing out of the lazerette!! Oh well we thought, we can use the main engine for charging. After a few hours the temperature alarm on the main engine went off......
Sooooo we checked the main engine impeller - shredded!! And I mean not one single vane left on it ( and there are 12 of the little buggers ) all gone into tiny tiny pieces. We traced this back to a squid living in the sea cock. The little so and so was jammed in tight. The story of its final demise and ejaculation is something that can only be appreciated with visuals and a large rum!! Anyway, we believed that was the problem and put another impeller in. That lasted for 10 hours before it blew itself apart!
At this juncture we also had checked the generator and found its impeller in bits too. All the impellers were less than a year old!!
So we fitted a new impeller on the generator and set it going. Clouds of smoke in the lazerette. We traced this back to exhaust fumes. The plastic box where the exhaust fumes are cooled and muffled had destroyed itself at the intake pipe. Melted into a mush!
So we now have no generator and no engine and it's cloudy so the solar panel isn't working.... And no way of charging the batteries.... No wind either so even if we had had a wind generator it would have been useless!
Technical phrases were used like F€%¥!!
Anyway.... We now have an industrial generator on the aft deck knocking out more noise than a bank of Marshall speakers at a Status Quo concert! But the batteries are charging and we haven't lost the contents of the freezer!! We had an engineer out and he tracked the engine problem to a tiny leak in the water pump which he guesses has just been building up over time. He took that away and fixed it and we were back with a running engine. We have everything crossed that it now is fixed. This is largely due to the fact we have used our last spare impeller for the main engine!! When in three years you have changed the impeller once (and that was after 2 years - not because it was worn, just time expired) you don't expect to go through 3 in almost as many days!! It ran well for 8 hours on the way over here from Santa Cruz so we are rebuilding our confidence.
We think the exhaust box may be repairable with a bit of fibre glassing.... Although Alex is worried that the chemicals we have bought to do it can be formed into a small bomb!!
Where does that leave us.....
At the end of the day we are getting Neil to ship out some more impellers and maybe a new exhaust - that will take minimum of 11 days. So we are not moving from the Galápagos until then. Bittersweet on board at the moment as our hearts want to take us south to Easter Island and Pitcairn but our heads are telling us to go the Marquesas and the safe option. It is the more travelled route and we have friends sailing towards the same destination at the same time. And to be honest we are not comparing Bognor Regis and the Caribbean..... We are comparing two of the most spectacular places on earth.... So our choice means we get to see yet another spectacular island chain in the world...
We are all in good spirits and this route means the tea bags won't run out! We have agreed that at some point in the future we will all come back and do it again!
Love from all on board