Pithos Cove
Scott-Free’s blog
Steve & Chris
Mon 10 Aug 2009 15:00
Monday 10th August
2009
We stayed in Pithos
Cove for a lazy day of swimming and relaxation - and stripping down a winch to
find why it had seized! During our sail yesterday, the port primary winch
had jammed in one direction, and we had had to use the secondary winch
instead. Given that we had serviced all the winches in the winter, we were
a bit surprised by this, however when we got it apart and found that two of the
pawl springs had broken we were less so - we had been unable to replace these as
we could not get hold of spares (they are Dutch made Enkes winches and Enkes
have gone out of business!) so we had cleaned them up and reused them. The
springs are tiny compared to the size of the winch, and it was small pieces of
them that had got between the teeth of the cogs and made them seize. The only
thing we could do was to get them apart,clean them up and replace the springs
with the slightly smaller Lewmar ones we have on board.
One of the
culprits - the bottom arm snapped off and jammed the
cogs
A naked winch and a semi-naked Steve!
We put the winch
back together and tested it- it worked fine now in the direction it had not been
working in, but now it wouldn't work in the opposite direction! It turned
out that the other two pawl springs had also snapped. So we had to replace
them too. The winch is now working fine, but we wonder why all four
springs failed at the same time. It just proves what we were told about
the cruising life - it's all about mending boats in lovely
places!
We rowed ashore
in the evening to walk along the path into the little village about 1km
away. As we were looking at the taverna menu, Steve recognised a boat tied
alongside the jetty and at the same time June and Geoff appeared on
Concerto. It is always good to see familiar faces and we
exchanged stories and then decided to have dinner together. The food was
unremarkabke but the company was good - so good in fact that it was 1a.m. before
we realised it and we still had to walk back to the cove! Needless to say
we were not up early the next day!