I spent much of the 24th cleaning, washing, drying and tidying the boat as well as some cooking, when rowing past Gary’s boat the twins spoke to me and were worried that Gary may struggle to get aboard Yemaya as he’d hurt his hip, doing too much exercise the day before - they had all gone to San Juan to work as extras on film. I did some last minute shopping and returned to the boat, sending a watts app to Gary saying would he prefer it if I brought dinner to them. It took a long time for me to get the message across - my telephone is in a constant battle with me, it prefers to log onto Claro and not Claro 3g or 4g, on claro it only works as a phone, not internet. I have mostly been able to get around it by turning it off and on again or going to aeroplane mode and back to normal but sometimes it puts up more of a fight than others. Anyway by 1700 I knew I was taking dinner to them and not vice versa and at 1830 arrived with a shopping bag full of fishcakes, moroccan chicken and cous cous. They had enjoyed watching ‘The Restless Wind’ and when I mentioned ‘Bold Journey’ Gary was keen to watch that so we enjoyed that along with the advertisements, had a good dinner and chat but Gary was in a fair bit of pain and retired to bed shortly after the meal so, after some chatting whilst in his bed and being nursed by the twins, with ice packs I left. I had it wrong earlier, there are 3 women on the boat, Sally and Sylvie, twins, and Anita who I had thought was a third daughter but turns out to be Gary’s partner, also I had thought Gary had 8 children, it turned out that it was just 8 with his first wife, he has 11 in total as he was married twice so has been doing well, making up for luggards like myself.
Yesterday morning I found out that the windlass was not working as it should, when I got it working before I had a lead weight and the spinnaker pole pushing on the switch on deck to get it to make contact but I had failed to check that it stopped when the pole and so on were removed. When I put the breaker on the thing started turning which it shouldn’t have. With a bit more investigation I found that the switch was permanently on. Once I had removed it and diassembled it it worked fine, I gave it a squirt of wd 40 and hopefully that will be it for now. Upon reassembly it now works as it should. I had to return the car by 1200 and had two things on the shopping list to acquire before then along with filling up with petrol; an inner tube for my bike and because it has sort of aero rims it needs a particularly long valve stem, I had tried in Walmart but that was no good. The first bike shop I googled and went to didn’t exist, or didn’t appear to, the second said it was open but didn’t appear to be, I was just pulling away when someone else went up to the door, rang the bell and was let in. They seem to keep the premises locked for security reasons. I found another parking spot and returned and bought a tube then went to ‘home depot’ the B and Q equivalent because I needed some sikaflex and Sylvie had told me that they sold it, which they did, or 3m 5200 anyway, the same thing. I then went to go to enterprise to return the car at which point the telephone decided not to let me have internet, solidly and exclusively locking onto Claro. I tried all the tricks several times, in the meantime driving in about the right direction but not even having an address to ask people where it was. I filled up with fuel, - quite cheap here at about a dollar a gallon, yes gallon. (Although their gallons are only 3/4 of a proper gallon). Driving aimlessly around various back streets without the computer to guide me was frustrating and a little cursive but eventually I found the place and dropped the car off and was dropped back to the marina. In the course of the morning I had been invited to lunch with Gary et al and dropped in on the way back, Gary seeming to feel much better and we had a good lunch of fried rice, carrots and pork and beans in a sauce, which Anita had cooked. All very good. They demonstrated their locking hatch which seems good, it works on solenoids and once closed a board lifts up at the back of the sliding hatch preventing it from opening, it. Is activated with a hotel style security card. The board wants to be up but the solenoids pull it down and it has wheels to run on the hatch when it is open or partly so. Very impressive.
Once back aboard Yemaya I tackled the leaks, or started to, the hatch looks more complex so having tried a few nuts on the inside of that but seeing two which are going to be an issue I concentrrated on the mast shroud, not a good description, where the mast goes through the deck there is a plate around the mast which has a sort of curved bit coming up from it around which a canvas shroud which is attached to the mast and is secured with a gigantic jubilee clip. Water had been coming off the bolts. I undid all the bolts and moved it up as far as possible, owing to one thing and another I couldn’t move it up more than an inch, anyway I cleaned off the old sika as best I could, put some new stuff in and pushed it back down and, after a bit of a game, re inserted the bolts, I sikaed these up pushed it all fully down just in time for a rainshower to hit us, a proper tropical rain shower. I gathered everything together, put the hatch back on, and stopped for the night. The leaks down below were horrendous, I had hoped it might be almost water tight by now, but no. Job for this morning is to tighten the bolts, without turning them and hopefully it will be at least as water tight as before, if I’m really lucky it will be completely water tight but with the mast in place it’s impossible to get the ring high enough to make a good job and I’m worried that things may well be worse than before, we’ll have to wait and see. It has discouraged me from pulling the hatch off completely, I may just re seal the 3 forward starboard bolts which are where the leak appears to be from and they are easy to get to. At the moment I’m just wasting time to give the sun time to dry out the mast fitting. It’s a bit of a shame because it was all nice and clean and tidy down below but now is a mess again. Actually now I think about it I could do the hatch which I haven’t so far disturbed other than to see if I can get to the nuts underneath. First some breakfast, which reminds me, after I had poured milk into my granola I managed to knock it over into the fridge yesterday morning, most irritating because I had cleaned out the fridge the day before and needed to do it all over again.
Anyway once my jobs aboard are finished for the day I think I’ll do some last minute shopping on the bike, go to the art museum which is, apparently, good and maybe set off tonight or in the morning for Salinas, just 15 miles from here.
Slainte
Jock and Yemaya.