27 October 2011 Chaguaramas, Trinidad
I’m still trying to get an engineer to look at our broken watermaker, but the only person that they can send is not at work today, so I’ll try again tomorrow. This left me with no great plans, so I spent the morning sorting out moving of our stuff in the UK and catching up on our web site. Glenys went into West Mall to do some cathartic shopping.
I feel a little trapped again – we’re waiting for the US Visa appointment in seven days’ time and I have no idea when the watermaker engineer will come out.
We’re having very heavy thunderstorms at the moment. The weather is pleasant first thing in the morning, but the clouds are building up before lunch. We’ve had some very close lightning strikes and huge claps of thunder before heavy rain starts. This doesn’t make it easy to do any jobs on the boat and the danger of a direct lightning strike on Alba is very real. Two yachts were struck a couple of days ago and had their entire electronic equipment blown out, including fridges controllers, generator panel and navigation equipment. It would be a real nightmare if that happened – we’d be trapped for months, while we replaced everything. Let us pray.
28 October 2011 Chaguaramas, Trinidad
I rang the water maker company and they will send somebody out first thing on Monday morning. We now have to make our fresh water last for another three days.
We have two water tanks connected together -the lower one is below the saloon floor and the other is under the port seat in the saloon. There’s a water gauge that should show the amount of water remaining in the lower tank, but it’s never worked. This has not been a problem before, because while we were making water, we always kept the top tank half full. After a week without running the watermaker, we’ve now emptied the top tank and it would be good to see how much water we actually have left in the lower tank.
I decided to remove the sender for the water gauge from the lower tank. This should have been a simple matter of unscrewing the sender from the inspection plate at the top of the tank, but this is a boat and nothing is easy. It was seized. As I put more force on the spanner, the whole plastic body crumbled apart. I then had to remove the whole inspection plate and spend 30 minutes with a small screwdriver scraping away the plastic from the threads in the inspection plate. I was left with a 40mm diameter hole in the inspection plate with nothing to screw into it.
I took the remains of the sender to Budget Marine, but they said they would have to import one from the USA and it would take a week. I decided not to bother, it’s more likely that it will take longer than that and I don’t want to be trapped in Trinidad any longer than necessary. I bought some “Starboard”, which is ½” thick plastic board and spent a couple of hours making and fitting a replacement inspection plate. So, after five hours of effort, I still don’t have any way of seeing how much water we have left…
29 October 2011 Chaguaramas, Trinidad
I started to make a table top for my fish preparation table that I had fitted to the stern arch. I cut it out from the remainder of the Starboard using a jigsaw on the back deck. It took three hours to measure up and cut the two pieces. Cutting the Starboard produces lots of small plastic flakes, which blow around in the slightest breeze and stick with static electricity to anything. I was covered from head to toe in the stuff. We’ll be finding these bits of plastic all over the boat for months.
In the afternoon, we went to the movies and saw Real Steel – a fun movie. It was great to be cold again in the air conditioned cinema. Back on the boat, I decided to publish some small videos to YouTube and added some pages to our website linked to the videos.
30 October 2011 Chaguaramas, Trinidad
It’s Sunday today, so we decided to go for a walk. Despite being in the Chaguaramas National Park, there aren’t a lot of places to go. The anchorage is surrounded by very steep hills with dense jungle, but there aren’t any paths close to us. A sketch map in the cruising guide shows a road up to the top of a nearby hill, but when we walked to the start of the road, a big sign said “restricted access”. As there’s still a State of Emergency in force in Trinidad, we decided to err on the side of caution and retreat.
Fortunately, we had a Plan B. We walked three miles along a road to the Macqueripe National Park. It was a very long straight road with a couple of slight bends – very boring apart from seeing a few brightly coloured birds. When we arrived near the entrance to the park, we took a small detour following a sign to the “Bamboo Cathedral” which was beautiful - the track goes through a an area of very tall bamboo, which has grown in sweeping arcs across the road creating a tunnel twenty metres high – a lovely visual effect.
After walking up to a cliff overlooking the north coast of the island, we retraced our steps and went into the park, which only comprises a café and a beach. It’s advertised as the most beautiful beach in the area, but that description ought to be taken with a pinch of salt. We had a coke and walked back to the main road.
We arrived back on the boat at three o’clock. It was only a four hour walk, but we were tired – we’re not used to walking any more. We chilled out for the rest of the afternoon and then went for Ribs and Chips in the bar at Power Boats – we’re back in Chaguaramas...
31 October 2011 Chaguaramas, Trinidad
I picked up the Eco-tech electrician from the Power Boats dock and he agreed with me that the starter capacitor looked damaged after our overheating episode. He removed the whole pump and motor assembly, which was a struggle in the tight space at the bottom of a cupboard. The poor guy was suffering from a flu virus and after 30 minutes of struggling in the rolling boat, he looked pretty grim and somewhat seasick. He retreated in to the cockpit with a glass of water, while I carried the pump assembly and his tools into the dinghy. Hopefully, he’ll check everything today and we’ll get it back tomorrow.
Our wind generator has been playing up ever since I had the bearings changed a couple of months ago. When it has been running for a while in 25 knots winds, it goes into a “Free-wheel” mode and rotates at a very fast speed. I’ve had to switch it off a few times. While dropping off the Eco-tech electrician, I bumped into Doug who owns the company that manufactured the wind generator. I described the problem and he said to drop it in and he’ll get one of his guys to have a look.
We’ve been using Glenys’s brother’s house as our mailing address. Now that Gareth has sold his house, we’ve decided to move our mailing address to my brother Andrew. We suspect that Gareth is going to be moving again within the next couple of years, so it will be less hassle to move our mail to a more stable address. We prepared a list of thirty or so companies that need to know our new address and Glenys made a start by spending a few hours on the Internet changing addresses on line and printing off forms.
We went to the supermarket at Crews inn and called into see Bonnie & Maury on their Hallberg Rassey 43 called “Smidge”. They come from the Chesapeake area and we’ve picked up a bit more local knowledge on that area.
We went to the pot luck barbeque at TTSA in the evening and drank more beer.
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