24 Aug 06 - 27 Aug 06 - At Mallorca. No crew. Repairs.
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Well we arrived ok to Mallorca, and finally anchored up at Porto Nous (39N31,77 20E34,17) as both Palma and Porto Nous marinas were full.
Good thing is that it saves us money as each night in port would have been around 150-200Euro. Bad thing is that its much more complicated to go shopping and to refill our water tanks.
Groceries has to go by our small tender/dingy. Fortunately its quite stable. Unfortunately, our gangway aft has stopped moving over night which means entering the dingy has to be done on the side of the boat via a 2nd swimladder, which can be dangerous when small waves hits the Dimitris sideways as it starts to roll quite heavily and thus the dingy or humans can be semitrapped underneath its side if not carefull.
We discovered the problem when Soeren was to disembark from the ship. As we couldnt guarantee that we would reach our next destination with a decent airport within the timeframe he had, to be able to go back to start his education (he is gonna be a pedagog... one that usually cares for children in day cares etc... and we have discovered he is quite good at that as Katharina really liked staying around him). Good luck with your education Soren. It was a joy having you onboard. Not to forget Nikolai who disembarked same day as he had to start on work in Kastrup airport as an air traffic controller (he had a year leave crewing on luxury vessels...no... ours is not by far in that category :)). There is no doubt Nikolai is a true sailor! He has been racing sailboats since a kid, and knows allot about it. Ive certainly learned a few tricks from you during the time you stayed on board!
So we are back to the basics... Esmeralda, Katharina and I. We have been searching for crew locally at Mallorca, but unfortunately noone has been signed in.
We still look for crew and are willing to pay reasonable expenses getting here, but only if the crew member is ready to go the whole way back to DK with us!
Otherwise we have been having a walk in the small village/city of Porto Nous. I found a doctor, which is Swedish but talking perfect Danish... quite cool :) He had a look at the toe, and it was all fine and good. In a years time from now, I should have a new nail... will make it look quite much better. Now it seems like one can see either the bone or some tissue attached between mussles and the bone where there earlier were a nail ;) Anyway.. its not much of a hinderance. I walk fine and can even work manually ok... well... as good as before the nail problem anyway.
As we have several things to repair, I had better go start doing some of them:
- The gangway, which is actually of high priority to us of safety reasons. We found a marine electrician (Noel Dyne) who had a look at it for us. It seems that a solenoid (that is clicking when it should) is anyway broken as it doesnt let any current thru to the electric hydraulic pump. Unfortunately he seems to have problems finding a replacement solenoid (relay), but hopefully today he will be able to do some magic.
- The Tecma toilet. It has been smelly since departure from Korinth as we couldnt flush the last (quite sizable) dump. Esmeralda has been very annoyed (and so have I) about having a brand new 1200 Euro toilet that doesnt flush. Fortunately that Noel guy, also services Tecma. So he was asked what was wrong, and his immediate answer was.. the pump must have seized. He got us a replacement pump which I had to fit myself. Nasty job as the toilet had to be turned upside down to get to the old pump. Well after some shitty work, loosening several pipes in the other end as Panos people unfortunately cut them to fit not leaving some extra decimeters, cutting out the toilet from its bed of silicone etc. (a whole days hard labour), I got the toilet out and had a look at the pump there.
It was a 24V pump, and the one I got from Noel was a 12V pump... Argh...
So no go. I decided anyway to check if it really could be true that the pump was seized. So I disassembled the control box, meassuring on it for currents and voltage to see if the motor got anything to work with at all. It turned out that it didnt.. so perhaps the control panel was at fault (Panos believed so).
Before setting everything back I decided to make a last check on if could feed the pump its required 24V just to hear it work. While doing that, I discovered some wire connections which could only be accessed thru a small hole about 5 cm in diameter. I pulled them out and saw lots of green dust coming out along with the cables... AHA... corrosion! Although the cables and connections were only made 4 weeks ago or so, some of them had already corroded completely. The power line with the 24V did have a connection but only let enough current thru to try to drive the LED and relays in the panel, but not enough to power the very hungry pump (about 480W).
Instead of using connectors, I chose to solder the wires that had been affected. And voila! Toilet was working again!
The reason for the corrosion is ofcourse of interest. The small 5cm whole (and another of about 2.5cm just next to it) hadnt been sealed off. That means that water from shower or the occational drip of seawater that ended up on the toilet table, ran down the wall and into the uncovered holes. So a cover had to be made. Gaffa tape is quite good for stuff like that ;)
Then I had to reassemble it all again and finally... get a much needed shower!
The pump we got from Noel will go back again. Its anyway 250 Euro worth of property.
- Another breakage we had early on our trip was the breaking of the steelwire in the port side davits (crane). I have also fixed that again by removing the bad steelwire and pulling new thru the davits (something of a puzzle requiring some funny inventions made of gaffa tape and sticks along with thin rope and some weights).
- Water leaks in the saloon. Some of the leaks has been tracked to the sealing of the windows on the side of the saloon. They have been temporarely sealed and should be quite easily fixable back in DK. The worst leak is the one from around the overhead window. Its apparently not the window itself that is leaking, but something underneath the teak deck there. I did follow Panos advice and removed 3 pieces of teak to discover the joint of two plates of plywood underneath the teak there, but when watering it, it didnt seem to be the leak. I will try to take down the roof inside the saloon to see if I can get a picture of where the water is sipping in. There must be a hole thru the fiberglass (which the roof is essentially made of) somewhere.
- Water leaks in the master cabin. It appears that some sizable leaks also exists in the master cabin. Possibly in the overhead windows which makes our new bed quite wet in the head end towards the forward bulkhead. Some invesigation is needed to find what to seal there.
Our plan now is (unless we get someone to crew with us) to sail stretches of 90-100nm max every day and find a place to anchor as Im the one that will be responsible for most of the sailing. As I need some sleep, Id better get that when at anchorage.
We do need to refuel on the way too, but our tank capacity should give us around 100h of engine time at 6.7 knots (1800 revs). So even without wind or unfavorable winds, we can still get some way. Mooring for refueling shouldnt be too difficult as there usually are someone on land that can receive our mooring lines and tie us up. However mooring in a harbour is something we will try to avoid, only being Esmeralda and I as the boat is too heavy and big to manouver (we dont have a bowtruster which would have made life much easier in that regard) safely backing it in. We may however still have to do that to get water refills. But we will see what can be done while refueling diesel.
Today (Sunday 27. Aug) we will get the pump returned, hopefully have our gangway solenoid replaced, have some sort of fix for the saloon overhead leaking and see if we can go shopping somewhere. Tomorrow we hope to go from here unless someone gives us a call on SMS saying we should wait a day or two more for them to arrive!
Mallorca 1 Porto Nous |
Mallorca 2 |
Mallorca 3 |
Mallorca 4 |