The joys .....
Rhiann Marie - Round the World
Stewart Graham
Wed 27 Apr 2011 05:49
|
Wednesday 27 April 0826 Local Time 0326
UTC
04:13.18N 073:32.16E
Shocking service I know! It has been eight days
since I last blogged and I can't really give you a good reason why. However here
is where we are.
Our mission to get west now well and truly behind
us, the "delivery" crew now back in Scotland and our Australian
visitors now been and gone the preparations for our next long leg - south
now - has to be prepared for.
Incidentally this really is the first time we will
have sailed any significant way south since our butter melted and we turnd right
to cross the atlantic at the Cape Verdes. We will now also have to cross the
equator another two times to get home.
In the most amazing Dickensian like little armature
rewinding workshop, up a back alley in Male town I got the stator coil
of my alternator rewound and the regulator modified to provide us again with the
means to charge our 24V domestic battery system from the alternator. The
generator also does this but it has had it's moments too so we don't want to be
solely reliant on it. That leaves the fridge to fix. Here the news is not so
good we have had two sets of refrigeration engineers aboard and frankly I
dont think they know what the problem is and the issue is further
mystified behind a screen of language and communication barriers. So loads
of rotten food is going over the side and the fridge is a little bit honking.
The freezer appears to be going OK on one side but the other side (there are two
compressors) appears a bit suspect.
However I think we have to leave anyway. The parts
I was waiting for in Sri Lanka have not turned up here yet and again we
have to move on with out them. So my furling foil repair job has to stand up to
the one thousand eight hundred miles to Mauritius and my wallet has to
withstand a further fed ex parcel charge to get my (boat) parts to Mauritius. At
this rate then these parts will be circumnavigating the world in the comfort of
a Fedex cargo hold but just two weeks behind me. I am sure however they will
not feel half as weary as I do.
And I do. Yesterday I think the activity and the
near two thousand miles at sea during the ten weeks since my operation
caught up with me a bit and I felt totally drained. We had three planned
sets of vistors to come over the past ten weeks too and I was insistent that
they all come which they did and we thoroughly enjoyed each and every one of
them. We also had two crew aboard for a few weeks and while that is a great help
it is also to some extent a bit of a strain and what I really need to do now is
chillax a little on this next three hundred miles south through the Maldivian
Atolls and try to get some of that rest that was prescribed to me after my
operation.
The joys of cruising such as fixing broken furling
foils, alternators and fridges, especially in this stiffling heat however,
does not exactly qualify as resting for my achy-breaky-back. And
while I am having a whinge I can confirm that the anchorage, the
only practical one for Male town, at the airport lagoon, underneath the flight
path and open to the seasonally prevailing westerlies must be one of the
worst three anchorages we have been in since leaving the UK! We are pitching and
slamming continually and trying to sleep in the slamming is ..... mmm?
...................... yes! Shit! Every time the transom slams down off a
wave and the rig rattles I swear the steelwork in my back does the
same.
On the upside family appear to be doing well at
home and Gael Force continues from base camp to base camp during its ascent of
Success Mountain.
|