We can work it out
Serafina
Rob & Sarah Bell
Sun 25 Jul 2010 06:51
Having arrived in Malta and taken stock of things we had of course to go through Immigration and Customs etc. Oh what a relief it is to be back in the West again! The formalities were barely that and although I did need to present myself to the customs office, the marina sent me down in one of their cars with Richard who is one of the marineros. He had prepared all the paperwork for me and had actually signed it all as well, but the customs officer said that he would prefer it if I signed as well! It was all good humoured and relaxed and on my return to the marina I set about finding the Raymarine agent and all the other specialists we now needed to see.
However first and most important to me was to find a computer repair shop or whatever to see what could be done about my dead computer. (This is the one I use for work as well so it was critical to get this resolved ASAP.) I was directed by the marina staff to two possible shops, but they actually marked my map incorrectly and so after failing to find them, I asked in a small shop if they could help. They directed me to another place which was a healthy walk away but this turned out to be a very lucky break. They did not make any promises but took the machine and told me to call back the next day. In the event they replaced the keyboard and RAM and managed to get it all up and running again which was just fantastic. They also had plenty of other advice to offer and as a result I am doing things a little differently now.
Finding the marine experts turned out to be a breeze as well, as they all have their offices, along with all the chandlery shops etc, within 400 metres of the marina. I had soon spoken to them all and arrangements were in place for people to come out see to our problems.
Sarah had meanwhile set about washing all the encrusted salt off our topsides and after two hours of spraying, scrubbing and leathering she declared herself moderately satisfied. We listened to the SSB radio at 6.00 pm local time hoping to hear Scott free broadcast their position but we heard nothing.
On Wednesday morning, Stefan came from ?Medcom? to look at the SSB Radio. It took him less than 15 mins to find the fault in the wiring done by Najad when building the boat and he soldered the joint correctly. It then took a further hour and a half to get confirmation that it was all working OK as the stations that you can use to test the system (Madrid, Palermo etc.) are not always fully operational. Anyway he declared it all working and left us highly delighted and very hopeful that we might get to speak to Scott Free in the evening. Sadly this did not happen, as again we could not hear them broadcast and it is probably because of our mooring being surrounded by other masts , high harbour walls etc.
On Thursday an engineer turned up from the boatyard that is attached to the marina to deal with the broken dipstick in the Yanmar gearbox and although he had to return later on, he solved the problem removing the broken piece from the gearbox casing without dropping anything into the gearbox itself. He returned the next day with a new replacement dipstick (actually he brought two suggesting that a second one might prove handy given how fragile they appear to be). Sarah meanwhile had found an excellent laundry nearby who managed to remove the now yellow, green and black mildew that had developed in our soaked bedding from that errant wave. She also found a brilliant supermarket (a ?drive?in? supermarket on the first floor of a building!) which has all sorts of wonderful things that we have not seen for ages. We were still unable to raise Scott Free on any sort of radio which was very frustrating. We also had a visit from Kurt who is the Raymarine engineer. He had expected the radar problem to be an easy fix involving software, so he was upset to find this not to be the case and after spending quite a bit of time testing the radar connections he went off promising to return the next day with the proper radar test equipment. The AIS problem he thinks is to do with the built in aerial splitter, but since we are discussing with his company the option of replacing our AIS ?receive only? set up with a full ?transmit? and receive unit, this may no longer be an issue for us.
[AIS as I tried to explain the other day allows us to see all the ships around us as they are required by law to transmit this data so it appears on our chart plotter. The unit we hope to buy means that we will be transmitting as well and so all the ships and anyone else with an AIS receive unit will be able to see us and our data, which is a huge safety issue when offshore.]
Friday became a Red Letter day when I raised Scott Free on the VHF radio. We immediately transferred to using the SSB (because we can!!) and chatted for a while. They were only 35 miles out of Valletta and hoped to be arriving around tea time. Other aspects of the day were less good and the principle disappointment was the non arrival of the Raymarine engineer, so we have to hope he appears on Monday otherwise we are going to be staying here in Malta a while longer.
Around 3.00 pm Scott Free pulled in and docked just along the pontoon from us. We joined them for a celebratory bottle of bubbly and in the evening they came round and had dinner on Serafina. They had taken a full 14 days to do the trip, but had resolutely stuck to not using the engine even when the wind had dropped away and actually spent one night just drifting in a flat calm. They were very well and like us had learnt a lot about themselves and the boat from the trip. They also had a long list of problems to get solved, the most pressing being the broken autopilot which had meant that the two of them had had to hand-steer the boat for 10 days.