Well, the weather gave us a bit of a break this past week. We actually had 4 days of sun and winds less than 20 knots! Woohoo! Of course, then the wind started blowing again. But now we’ve got a couple of days of cloudy but calm conditions before this week, guess what? Yep! Wind and rain. We are in the Yasawa Island chain slowly making our way southwest. We spent a few days at the southern tip of Yasawa Island and then went Nacula Island and anchored off of Blue Lagoon Resort. I have fond memories of it from last year when we visited. Kim did not. Guess who was right? We lasted less than 24 hours because we rolled back and forth all night from the swell. No thanks. So yesterday, we moved on and are now at Yaqueta Island, anchored off Navuku Stars Resort. Kim wasn’t too stoked about this destination because getting here requires threading through some pretty gnarly reefs, but after I had been the one to choose the Blue Lagoon anchorage, my judgement was beyond question, so here we are. And, turns out, we made a good choice. We went ashore last night for dinner and had a lovely meal. I am skeptical of the food at these remote resorts and this place brands itself as “Italian-Fijian”, whatever that is. I’ve been jaded ever since I ordered carbonara and got alfredo. First world problems. But Navuku Stars does itself proud on food. Good stuff! It’s a small place-only ten guest houses and it doesn’t bill itself as a dive resort. It’s just “come, relax on the beach, snorkel, relax on the beach, relax on the beach”. I think if I stayed a week I might go stir crazy, but it’s a lovely place and the staff is very kind.
In other news, the boat problems are starting to creep back. We’ve been quite fortunate this season in not having a lot of stuff break. Well, there was the standing rigging, but we kind of felt that coming after having some of it fail last season. Our autopilot is acting up. In heavy seas, it will just disconnect and go into standby mode-not convenient in those conditions. This was happening last year, but I thought I fixed it by installing the drive unit and rudder position sensor correctly (previous owner-don’t get me started). But I guess not. I think it’s because in heavy seas, the drive unit is trying to draw more current than the control unit can supply, so the control unit shuts off. The question is, where is the problem with the electrical supply? I’m not sure exactly. Perhaps the answer will magically appear. We also have rotting sole. That’s “sole”, not “soul”, although the argument could be made… The sole is the floor. And the sole outside of our shower is rotting because the shower pan leaks. I think I’ve stopped the leak at the moment, though after 3 years, the damage is done. This is a known issue in the Stevens 47, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when Kim’s foot went through the floor, but still, it’s a wake-up call. Short of ripping up the shower pan and the sole boards and rebuilding, options are limited, so instead, I put extra wood supports under the floor in the bilge. When we get to New Zealand, I’ll swap the wood for fiberglass so it’s durable but for right now, we can walk in safety. And one of our winches broke. Technically, it’s been broken for a while. But then it broke more. I have been procrastinating on trying to fix it because there are SO. MANY. PARTS. But when it started spinning both ways, I decided I should probably take the plunge. It wasn’t too bad. Nothing was actually broken. Just a lot of thick gunk build-up on the pawls so they weren’t locking the winch in place. Some cleaning and new grease and we are back in business!
And then there’s the infection. We’ve got it. Yep. We’ve got Diesel Bug. I noticed last week that when we tried to run the engine at full throttle, we weren’t getting full rpms and as we ran, the rpms slowly declined. That’s a symptom of a restricted fuel supply. I changed the fuel filters but that didn’t help. Then I took the inspection port off the fuel tank. Uh-oh. Diesel Bug. Diesel bug is a bacterial growth in diesel fuel. Typically, what happens is that a small amount of water gets into the diesel tank through contaminated fuel or condensation. That water sinks to the bottom of the fuel tank and the water layer allows bacteria to grow. It’s usually a diverse community of bugs (so forward-thinking) that, over time, produces a sludge which then gums up the fuel system, restricting fuel flow. Left untreated, it can completely block fuel flow and then… no engine. That would be unfortunate. So, cleaning our fuel system is now on the menu. The full-on treatment is to pull all the fuel out of the tanks, scrub them, polish the fuel, and then put it back, changing the filters again in the meantime. We can’t do that out here, so we’ve got a couple of options. We can high-tail it back to the big island and a marina and have a service do all that. Or, we can use a fuel pump to “suction” out the bottom of the tank and run it through a filter back into the tank. I’m not sure exactly what we’re going to do yet. And I haven’t inspected the second fuel tank to see if we’ve got the bug there yet.
Did I mention our watermaker broke? Yeah. That too. When did we realize it? When there was water leaking all over the place in the saloon. Those cabinets needed cleaning anyway. The flow meter broke-the plastic cracked-and started leaking water all over. Happily, the unit itself runs fine and I was able to Macgyver the flow meter with a clamp, so we’re back in business. Though it does look a bit sketchy.
That list of gear we need when we get to New Zealand is really growing!
Today’s project is to keep on scrubbing the hull to prep for New Zealand. They like it squeaky clean, so it’s a few more hours in the water for me. Did I mention the water’s not that warm this season?
