Rodney Bay, St. LuciaWe had arrived in balmy weather in the warm turquoise waters of the tropics. The sing song lilt of the St. Lucian’s Caribbean accent intensified our happy state of being in the islands of the Lesser Antilles. But just as you cannot run away from your problems, you cannot sail away from them either and we arrived with a list. Dois dove into it fixing two bilge pumps, the windvane bearing, two hoses on the generator and the starter solenoid the hoses had leaked on plaguing our TransAtlantic crossing. We patched dinghy leaks and ordered a fuel pump for the outboard motor from Florida. The new/used mainsail we picked up in Sicily was a good downwind sail for the crossing but did not handle upwind sailing well, and the sail to Panama would be a lot of that. A sailmaker at the marina quoted a very reasonable price to fix our old main that was botched in Greece, but as the work and time went by, he increased the price steadily… until it had doubled. There was no way out, so we would pick up the sail in a week, our next payday. We would make good use of the time addressing a few more housekeeping issues. I know what you’re all thinking. When are you going to visit the waterfall or the ruins or the museum? I had this discussion with a taxi driver on the way back from a provisioning run recently. He wanted to be our island tour guide. We are not tourists, I said. The thing about traveling for us is almost every waking hour and most of our sheckles go into 1 of 2 pots; the boat (of which is a small city of parts to maintain) or the life forms (food, medical, dental, optical etc.). There is not much left over for tourism. However we are looking forward to some time in the water soon. I worked on re-vitalizing the manual bilge pump. Dois installed the fuel pump on the outboard. I packed away winter clothes, etc. Dois worked on the starter as well as installing a new keyed ignition. The day arrived where we could get our sail out of hock. We had moved into the marina for a few days to work on the starter and we were anxious to move out of the confines of a marina and move down the Antilles island chain. We provisioned up again and were ready to leave the next morning. 8am we turned the key to start up the engine….errrrttt… that did not go well. The starter engaged the engine and then would not disengage. It whirred a horrendous noise and as long as the engine gets turned over, it feeds itself fuel and runs. The kill switch wouldn’t kill it, removing the fuse to the battery starter did nothing and the engine room started filling up with smoke. Dois grabbed a pillow and popped it over the air intake of the engine. Thwuup. That was the sound of the air intake sucking up the pillow. We are not sure if the starter burned up first or the engine died first (due to lack of air from pillow suffocation) but finally the crisis was limited to damage done and after it all; a burned-up starter. Our 40-yr-old-around-the-world-Perkins-tractor-engine survived again. It turned out the starter was rebuildable at a local automotive shop at a surprisingly reasonable cost; our very last dollars. We had come into the marina to work on the starter and now we were stuck there at a daily rate that was difficult to swallow and two weeks left until the next pay day. There we were; in paradise in a luxury marina for two weeks. We only lacked two things: a pool and money. We had plenty of Ashika jobs to keep us entertained. We had to re-sew the track slides on the repaired mainsail before installing on the mast. Then install batons and reefing lines. I made and installed rain deflectors on the cabin port-lights while Dois installed a new fuel pump on the dinghy outboard and changed its oil. It’s amazing how much junk we save because it may come in handy in a crisis. We cleaned and organized while justifying keeping the majority of the junk and watched YouTube News and Netflix shows on the Marina Wi-Fi. Again, finally, we got paid, took care of our marina bill and went to the market to re-provision. We are in the anchorage in St. Lucia as I write this, Dois has dinghied in to the Customs office to check out of this country. When he returns we’ll (hopefully… you just never know) pull the anchor and sail down to the southern end of this island to spend the night. Then leave for St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Woohoo! PeaCe
1 Comment
David Hoch
6/20/2023 01:56:54 pm
Bummer about Dois’s ankle - I can imagine how much it hampers him and the sailing life. My best wishes for quick recovery.
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
Dois Brock and Lauri Hamilton Brock splashed our boat Ashika into the Pacific April 2017 for a Round the World Tour.
Archives
February 2024
Categories |