39.12.072N 9.07.603E

Earlier in the week we went into town to the Internet café for a bit of “retail therapy”. There are a few things we need to replace/buy.

We were determined to work out how to pay for our bus rides. We tried paying on board the bus but they wouldn’t accept the money – waving us on quickly so they could speed off (remember they race all cars and buses here in Italy – taking money only slows them down!).

We went to the bus station – they have a sign “bus tickets not sold here – go to McDonalds”. As vegetarians we reluctantly went in to the “ticket counter”. They sent us to the train station to buy a ticket. Naturally they don’t sell bus tickets. Back to McDonalds – this time a different person who spoke better English explained we need to go to the bar in the train station – could they tell from our faces we were ready for a drink?

In the bar was a counter selling bus tickets. Success was within our reach. However our Italian is very limited and we failed to get the lady to understand what we wanted. We decided to get the bus anyway and try and explain our dilemma if we were asked where our ticket was (that would be fun!). We have now realised that we can probably ride the busses for free although we will try again to buy a bus ticket. 

Back at the boat we decided it is the time of the year to do a major service on the engine (we have also been motoring quite a bit so we’ve done over the amount of hours we should have before a service)

We replaced the air in filter (no problem), the air out filter (not too much of a problem), cleaned the sea cock filter (no problem), filled the grease gland (no real problem but took ages to unscrew the cap), and changed the impellor on the kitchen sink pump (ok – not really part of the engine!).

We then tackled replacing the impellor on the seawater cooling system. Now this was a problem. However after many a grunt and words not for little cats to hear, we finally removed it – along with a loose impellor blade. However the impellor we removed had all its blades! We have no idea how the loose blade got there or how many years it had been hidden in the pipes. These simple jobs took a whole day to complete. We still need to replace the fuel and oil filters and change the coolant – we will do this another day.

In among all the activity of the engine service – another boat came in for some repair work. We got up to find we had much more light at the back of the boat, and noticed that the dry dock behind us was much lower in the water than usual. We then saw a rather large ship heading to the dry dock. During the course of the day we had the noise of running water as they emptied the dry dock. It’s obviously quite a complex process as it did take all day.

Ship entering a floating dry dock (submerged at the moment it enters)