Day 6 - Passage to St Helena Day 6
Misterx
Tue 11 Mar 2025 20:58
11/03/25
8:30 pm
Day 6
Atlantic Ocean
DTD : 933 NM
Ah! The glamour of it all, sailing around the world on a indigo sea, gliding from one continent to the next...
Well, not what we are experiencing on this here vessel... The waves are over 3 meters according to our weather guru, wind of 20 knots, gusting 29... it is a little bit rolly and bouncy to say the least. And what that does, it disturb the water/oil or rather the watery oil at the bottom of the engine compartment, and every jump and roll send some of this watery oil on the floor boards in the galley...
No pink or blue jobs here, what we have is "pants' jobs", the ones so messy that you have to take your clothes off and do them in your pants. That would include anything to do with oil, bilge water, gasoil, etc. you get the idea, the job that would make a real mess of your clothes, that you are better off stripping off as cleaning up bare skin is far easier than trying to get these stains out, bearing in mind our water situation... not to be wasted on laundry for sure. making water in this kind of sea is challenging, nigh on impossible... we need calm water to make water.
So, to get back to our "pants' job" of the day, let me explain how this goes, of course, I am roped into this, I will be the chief bucket holder, in my knickers, while Ian will be sucking the watery oil from under the engine with a hand pump, in his pants. Sounds straight forward, until the lurching and jumping starts. And everything is sliding to the left, me desperately hanging onto a slippery bucket with black oil in in, and Ian, clutching a similarly slippery hand pump, still in the process of operating it, so still squirting a fair amount out and completely missing the bucket that i am still holding but now well out of his reach! We regroup, reposition ourselves for the next onslaught, and we slide to the right, and repeat, you get the picture. We manage to fill the bucket but it is carnage, watery oil everywhere, on the floor, on the cabinets, hands, feet, legs, faces.... and then we have to get this slippery bucket up the companionway, without the stairs, because we have had to take the stairs off to get to the engine compartment. Climbing on the engine, getting in the cockpit, boat still lurching left and right and chucking this black watery oil overboard, without spilling a drop... impossible! Soon the hand pump is inefficient, there we get to the really dirty bit, the sponge technic, Ian up to his elbow in the dark depth beneath the engine, you can imagine the state he is in when he calls it quit!
Fortunately, we only have 2 bucketful to deal with this time. And they are relatively small buckets, actually, let's talk buckets for a minute. The last decent sturdy bucket suitable for a very harsh life at sea, we have been able to get was in New Zealand, back in 2021. We have searched high and low for a replacement in Indonesia, and especially in Mauritius, where the need for a new bucket became pressing. There is no shortage of buckets, on the contrary, they do come in all shapes, colours and sizes, but not the strong plastic with a metal handle version that can be thrown overboard while underway, and still come up in one piece and full of water... That needs a very special bucket, that is indeed very difficult to find since China has cornered the market of bucket making. We have scoured a fair few Maurician "quincailleries", Mauritius is the land of quincailleries, there is one a every street corner, never seen so many of them anywhere else but we could not find a decent bucket, not even in the best of builders merchants, not even in the oldest establishments where stock has not moved much since the last century and you would expect a sturdy bucket to lurk in the back room. Our quest carried on in South Africa, again drawing a blank... where have all the sturdy buckets gone??? Desperate time, desperate measures, we finally opted for kids sand castle making buckets... advantages: they collapse (space saving) and are made of a kind of thick silicone type of plastic, not easily punctured, clean easily, square rather then round, come in a variety of cheery colours but they will never be thrown overboard, they would never come back!
We got 6 litres out of what Ian insist on calling watery oil.... more water than oil according to him. Let's not dwell on this too much...But what do you expect we have a Perkins engine and everybody knows they leak oil for fun!
And the search for the perfect bucket continues....
M