I can see clearly now.
Serafina
Rob & Sarah Bell
Thu 29 Jul 2010 05:00
Kurt, the Raymarine engineer came along in the morning and following
extensive testing he was finally able to identify the problem with our
radar which was a component in the main chart plotter. The question now
was did they have a spare circuit board on the island and who exactly was
going to pay for all this? I continued to exchange emails with Raymarine’s
head office whilst the local agent did likewise. The good news was that
the unit that was needed was in stock and so the job was scheduled to be
done on Tuesday.
In the evening Steve, Chris, Sarah and I went round to ‘Apparition’ for an
evening of Mexican Train, but Sarah also took the opportunity to quiz
Jackson and Rico all about the Caribbean and the East Coast of the USA
about which they have extensive knowledge. She also managed to win the
game hands down!
On Tuesday morning Raymarine came back to us with the very welcome news
that they were prepared to cover the cost of repairing the radar under the
warranty (£585 plus labour) and in due course Kurt appeared and dismantled
the E 120 and replaced the main circuit board inside. The good news is
that it all works fine now. The electrical charging issues have been
solved for now by performing a factory reset (bit of a cop out by the
engineer there) and so it all looks fine at the moment, but time again
will tell and exactly the same is true of the problem with the E 80
display. It would be easy to suspect that after the flurry of initial
works which were excellent, the rest of the solutions seem to be aimed at
getting us to leave the island and get things sorted properly somewhere
else!
No success either with tracking down the creaking sounds in the hull. One
needs us to remove some ceiling panels so we can investigate when sailing
next, however, for reasons best known to themselves, the builders at Najad
chose to fix these three panels with a VERY strong adhesive instead of the
usual clips that make it all so much easier. Hey Ho.
Still having to wait with fingers crossed to see if the new AIS
transponder unit arrives from Sweden in time to be fitted before we leave.
We still have the receive only unit of course, but that was playing up
badly during the last trip and so it would be great to get all this sorted
now.
Sarah and Chris set off in the afternoon for some retail therapy but came
back with very little to show for their outing except natty new haircuts.
Wednesday started with the prompt arrival of the fuel truck for us and
Scott Free. Very helpfully the truck had a hose long enough to reach all
the way down the full length of the pontoon to reach Scott Free at the
very end.
Sarah did pretty much a final food shop before we set off again and
together we finally made it on a tour of all the chandlery shops to work
our way through the list of bits and pieces we need. It has to be said
that Malta really is a breath of fresh air after all the places we have
been and it is wonderful to be able to find just about everything you need
and all at quite competitive prices.
The really good news towards the end of the day was the sudden arrival of
the AIS units at the dealer’s office and so we now can be sure that we
will have a new one installed either on Thursday or Friday morning before
we leave on the next leg of our journey. And yes, Sarah does regard it as
a very extravagant birthday present for Rob, although reports from Scott
Free of ships calling them up on the VHF and offering to alter course to
avoid them makes the price seem rather more reasonable!