Category: Uncategorized

What a busy week. It started when Jim kindly presented me with a new T-Shirt to mark my enrolment into the NBA world. I shall wear it proudly in San Francisco.

I also got to help Jim and Marty haul out the University of Vancouver’s fishing research vessel. It was going up on ‘the ways’, and as I should be doing the same, anytime in the last three weeks 🙁 I was able to get a feel for what was involved. This ship takes students out to do surveys on fish stocks, and other things I expect. Marty is a professor from the Uni and it was funny seeing him crawling under the boat applying antifoul, not the usual university research type of work.

Next up, while varnishing and chatting to Graeme about diving on the hull, I mentioned I had decided to do a scuba course in Mexico when we get there. Graeme, who dives but has just given up, offered to sell me his kit for a very decent price. I popped up to his house later that day, he has amazing views over the bay and strait, and we struck a deal. I am now the new owner of a lot of scuba gear I have no idea how to connect together and use. Hopefully it will all come clear in a few months time. Also the boat will be more stable now with the ballast weights for the diving belt, which must weight at least a ton.

The weather hasn’t been great this week, a bit cooler and overcast mostly. We had very strong winds for a few days but the rain we had has been welcome. A fire started over on the main island by the highway and could have got nasty, but the services got it under control.
One morning it was so grim I decided I could only do indoor jobs, so next on the list was to service the head (Toilet). It wasn’t faulty, but it has worked without attention for over two years, so to try to repeat that success, I thought I should clean out the pipes, which block up with calcium, and replace all the rubber seals and valves.

Last week I had delivered the template and old bow platform to Greg, a local carpenter to see if he could fabricate a new piece for me, by joining together 4 planks of cedar. I was amazed when he turned up less than 24 hours later with a basic platform, less the cutouts. He wanted to test it for size, and after spending an hour here trimming it to fit into the steel bow frame, he left to cut out the holes and reinforce it at the front.

Greg returned the next day with the cut-outs done, and a very smart looking platform.

I have decided to varnish this as it will protect the cedar in its exposed location at the bow. Above you can see it already looking golden with just one 50% varnish/ 50% thinner coat. It’s going to look great. I need to transfer the rollers from the old platform across this week.

The Radar.
It took a while and a few phone calls, but eventually Tom from the Ways was able to collect my new Furuno radar from Port Hardy over on the big Island.
Radar units don’t come with a mounting bracket, probably because you have a different one, depending if it’s going on a sailboat mast, a rear pole or a cabin top. Consequently you have to fork out a few hundred pounds for the bracket. I had a bracket for the old radar that was fitted to my mast and was very strong. To remove it and then poke a load more holes in my mast, beside weakening the mast, and being dangerous to attempt while swinging in a harness meant I would build an adapter of sorts to make the new radar fit the old mount. I was easily able to bring the old mount down with the old radar scanner and I made a sketch below of how I might join the old and new.

I was able to get Ken at Tarkanan to slice me off two lengths of aluminum which I then shaped and drilled to fit the old bracket.

The whole affair bolted together far better than I had imagined as is very strong.

A word of caution, if you want to use your feet instead of a vice for holding the metal still while you drill, I suggest you wear strong shoes. I noticed that socks on their own are no match for a spinning drill that skids off the metal into your foot. Fortunately my foot escaped unscarred, but now wants autonomy and independence from the rest of my body, in particular my brain. I just so happened to have a spare sock from the last laundry trip that I can now put to good use.

I’m posting this earlier than usual as I’m suffering from a bit of a cold and don’t feel up to climbing the mast, which is the next job, so I’m staying in catching up on paperwork!

Paul Collister

As a lifelong Raptors fan, it was great to be in their home country and watch them romp to the finals of the NBA championship and defeat the Golden State Warriors in a final comprising of six games, played between toronto and Oakland SF . We were going to be clearing in at Oakland when we go south to San Francisco, but given that this is the first time a non American team has won the NBA finals, we might clear in at Astoria now.
Seriously, Ivana, Jim’s wife is a big fan of NBA and kindly invited me along to the second of potentially 7 games, Jim cooked pizza for the first game and we all sat there cheering the team along. By the end of the first game, I had a basic grasp of the rules of basketball. The rules around fouling makes the UK soccer offside rule look quite simple. The raptors had the warriors on the run for most of the matches. I was invited to the subsequent matches and Jim cooked up Nachos, then Burgers, Ivana produced pies and ice cream, it was all jolly pleasant. By the end of the 6th match they were neck and neck, all the way. with just 0.7 seconds left on the clock, and with the raptors leading by one point and about to claim the title, the warriors called a timeout. Of course they didn’t have any timeouts left and so that caused a technical foul which gave the Raptors a chance to score two more points, but this also meant a few more seconds got added to the clock, giving the warriors a chance to get 3 points should they get possession after a missed shot at the basket. I expect you are ahead of me here on this, anyway it was all pointless, the Raptors scored from the foul and the hooter went and history was made.

Sue and Andy had watched the previous match down the pub, which is now open every night. I met the barman, Vincent, who comes here every summer for 6 months from Waterford Ireland. I told him we used to keep Stardust on the river in Dungarvin, which is close to Waterford, and he knew the exact spot, as he lives just a few miles away. Sointula keeps on amazing me with chance meetings like this. Sue and Andy met up with John (from the Hamble) the engineer who helped me with my water pump. It turns out that John and Andy have had very similar lives in the world of engineering.
A few days ago John introduced me to a different Andy who lives just around the corner and is another brilliant guy, and we had both built the same 80186 computer with wire wrap technology, back in the early 80’s. He was telling me how he struggled with his automatic wire wrap tool, I was stunned, I explained I didn’t realise there was an automatic tool as I did all mine with a manual tool, oh how we laughed, it was along the lines of the python sketch, ‘lived in a cardboard box, you were lucky, we couldn’t afford no boxes’

Sue and andy have been great hosts, providing dinner for me on a several occasions, Doug arrived a week ago and made friends with them and myself and he invited us all over to his for fresh prawns and pasta, so between all of these guys and Jim/Ivana I haven’t been able to eat any of the food I have onboard.

Doug is a lovely guy, with lots of knowledge and experience, he has raced big yachts around the world and has lived in Hong Kong for the last 15 years, he is married to a Chinese lady from Vancouver and given all that is going on these days with Huawei and Hong Kong he has been fascinating to chat with. I have tried to help him solve some of his NMEA data problems on his boat, but he ended up fixing them without me. He’s quite an inspiration for a man in his eighties.

Jim invited me out for a sail with some of his friends, we had heard of humpback whale sightings just a few miles away near Stubb Island in the Johnstone strait so headed of to check it out on Saturday. We didn’t see any but did see puffins, purpoises, dolphins and seals. On the way back, we did a sail-by past the waterfront of Alert Bay, the mostly first Nations settlement on Cormorant Island. They have been cleaning up the waterfront since Kathy and I visited it in 2018, and it’s looking great.

We had left early and I was worried we might get back after the shops had closed and I rushed to see Victor the Chilean baker when we tied up at 17:00. He told me he had sold all the loaves, then thoughtfully said ‘wait’ a few seconds later he said, they probably won’t come so you can have this loaf, and I got somebody else’s reserved loaf. With that small gesture I felt like I had finally arrived, acceptance into the community 😉 , at least by the baker. I presume there is one member of the community who now wants me to leave.
I have learnt a lot about the local community, people have confided the secrets of a remote island world, but I won’t give anything away here, just think ‘Whiskey Galore and Wicker man’. nuff said

There is an old fishing boat in the harbour that has been decaying away, it was beyond repair and just lately the boat has been pumping oil into the harbour whenever the bilge pump went off, which was quite often. The owner was requested to remove the boat and he decided to give it to a local who in return for hauling it out got the engine and a few other useful parts for free. I watched as it was hauled out on a trailer off to the knackers yard.

It’s good that the boat is no longer polluting the harbour, but sad that it’s going to be chopped up and burnt shortly.

Jim introduced me to a local guy who has a sawmill on the Island. He is providing me with some Red Cedar planking from which I can build a new bow platform for the boat. As you can see from the pic below the old one is a bit smashed up. This happened on our trip to Japan when the bow crashed down heavily into a wave that was rising up in front of us. The old platform was weak and splintered into several pieces. I couldn’t get teak in Japan, and can’t get it here, but I liked the idea of taking some cedar grown here on the island away with me. I don’t know how well it will fare, it won’t be as good as the teak, but it will be better than what I have now. It’s high quality cedar and a lot of the boats here use it in their construction so we shall have to see.

I made a template out of cardboard to help build the new one. I’m hoping to do better with wood than cardboard in getting the right shape 🙁

What with all of the dining and sporty activity I didn’t get much varnishing done, I have managed four coats on the port side, but the weather hasn’t cooperated, with rain every other day for a week now.
Today I managed to connect with Sue and Andy via SSB, they are heading south to the Sea of Cortez, and were on the far side of Vancouver Island in Sea Otter Cove, somewhere we will be by mid August. We couldn’t connect on 2 MHz, but did quite well on the 4 MHz Band.

My new radar still hasn’t turned up and the call to haul out at the ways hasn’t arrived yet. I leave for the UK in two weeks time so I’m a little worried that everything is going to happen at once at the last minute leaving no time for errors. Oh well, fingers crossed. I expect all will be completed by the time I post the next blog.

Paul Collister.

I haven’t posted for a couple of weeks because things were pretty boring for a while, but it’s hotted up the last few days.
I had several goes at varnishing the starboard side of the brightwork, but rain/humidity and blistering sun at various times scuppered my efforts. I had managed to get 6 coats of varnish on and it was looking great, I decided to sand to a very smooth surface ( 1000 grit) and put the final coat on. I had almost finished this when unexpectedly the heavens opened and trashed a lot of my work. In the end I got away with everything except for the cap rail. A light rub down and a re-coating should sort that.
Next I planned to swing the boat around to face the other way, but first I had to fix the engine temp gauge and a few other minor engine jobs. I also finished off the locker tops. This was the start of my main three disasters of the week. I had bought some gelcoat to see if I could touch up some of the gouges we got on the passage over. Gelcoat is basically polyester resin coloured white. It’s not easy to mix a small amount as the ratios between the resin and the catalyst and huge, and I think I had a few tablespoons of resin which needed a few drops of the MEK catalyst. I ended up with too much gelcoat, I was only experimenting at this point to see if I could mix it and keep it workable long enough to fill the gouges, however it soon became apparent that the gelcoat was pure brilliant white and my boat isn’t anything like white, even when cleaned. I spread some gelcoat over a bit of card to get a feel for working it with a spatula, I should have had about 30 mins before it went off. I also filled a hole in the cockpit well you can’t really see. Now what could possibly go wrong, well the wind got up, the card covered in gelcoat started flying around the cockpit, me jumping around trying to catch it, and in the process getting my knee in the new gelcoat in the cockpit, didn’t help. End result was gelcoat on the teak, all over my clothes and in my hair. Also three days later it still hadn’t gone off, so was still a major hazard. It’s hardened now!
Onto the next simple job (Disaster number two), some of the screws I had used to fix the piano hinge to the seat locker top were too long and were sticking out under the locker top. I decided to get my power grinder out, and grind them off so they would hurt anyone in the future. All I can say is there’s more to grinding than meets the eye. For a while I had a very well ground boat surrounding very pointy screws. At least I now have a place to use some of the gelcoat. I’m so often reminded of the episode of father ted when he is up all night removing the little bump in the car that’s first prize in the raffle, and in knocking the bump out he ends up eventually with nothing but bumps.
Enough maintenance for now, let’s get back to the varnishing, feel reasonably safe there.

So I waited until the following morning when it was dead calm, and with Jim onboard to assist, I reversed out of the harbour, I was quite nervous doing this, it’s been a while since I have helmed this boat, I wasn’t sure how fouled the hull & prop were, and the boat doesn’t like reversing to start with, it was about 4 boat lengths to get out, with just a few foot either side of clearance between other boats. Anyway I impressed myself by doing it without any issue, slow and steady, keeping the engine in neutral most of the time seemed to reduce the prop walk a lot. Also the bow thruster helped keep the boat lined up. Spinning the boat around I reversed back into the berth without issue and I was able to tie up port side to. Now I can do all the varnish work on this side.

Before I got stuck in I decided to have a bike ride and explore the long coastal road called Kaleva Rd. this is a long run on the Eastern end of the southern side of the island. The are lots of homes along the route and plenty of quirky sights as you can see below.

I have started looking into information about the Sea of Cortez, it looks fantastic, I’m getting excited about exploring the coast there.

A few days ago I spotted a Halberg Rassey yacht arrive, thinking this might be a European boat, I wandered over to their pontoon and spotted the Red ensign flying. After chatting with Sue & Andy on board, I learn they are Brits from Portsmouth, they have sailed here from the UK and arrived in Sointula from Japan, before that visiting Alaska, Borneo, Tioman, Anambas, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. They had been in most of the same ports as us and knew a lot of the people we had met. In one case we must have only missed them by a few weeks. So we have had a good natter, it’s been really interesting, especially as they have already done the South Pacific and so I can pick up a lot of info from them. Andy & Sue will be leaving soon and making their way down to the sea of cortez, arriving before us, but there’s a good chance we might see them there too. Next year they will leave Mexico and turn left back into the Atlantic whereas we will turn right and into the South Pacific.

Andy had a problem with his stern gear, in particular the bracket that houses his cutless bearing was damaged, and so he decided to haul out at the ways, just as I have decided to do. I went around to take pictures for him and to learn the ropes (no pun intended).

I have now bought a replacement radar, I went for the wireless furuno, which uses an ipad/iphone for displaying the radar output. This cost less than £1000 which is not bad as the wired ones tend to start around £1500 but require a display unit as well, which adds another £1000 and then your getting into all sort of connectivity issues. Another big factor for me is that I have the 12v at the mast already from the old radar so I don’t need to try and feed a new cable through the mast. I’m just waiting for it to arrive, we are saving on postage by waiting for someone who is passing through to collect it from Port Hardy and drop it off on this island.

Tonight I went with Andy & Sue to a concert in the athletic hall up the road. It was guitar and flute, most of the music was Spanish (Flamenco style) and South American performed by the Azuline Duo. It was wonderful, a great setting, lovely acoustics and a lovely appreciative audience

Today I stripped off all the varnish on the port side, tomorrow is sanding and sealing, then varnish, varnish and more varnishing all week. The hope is that I can haul out next week and get the bottom done. I fitted a new accumulator tank for the water and a new water pump for the deck wash this week, so all in all the boat’s pretty good right now.
It does seem though that I’m going to have to replace the hoses for the cockpit drains, as my third and final cock up this week was kicking over a bottle of Acetone in the cockpit well and not twigging what the smell was before half a litre had dripped onto the cockpit sole,removing a large chunk of gelcoat, before running of down the drains. This is a major pain, the hoses aren’t leaking yet, but acetone may or may not have damaged them, it depends what chemicals are used in the hose construction, and it may be that they will fail at some point, maybe tonight or maybe next year or maybe never. The thing is, when they fail, the boat will flood and probably sink. It’s not a bad idea to change them anyway, they are quite old.

Paul Collister

Possibly my most boring blog to date ? Mostly boat jobs.

Tuesday 21st May:

Fitted the water pump yesterday and popped up to the ways to see if the oil cooler was ready, but it wasn’t so I returned to the boat and worked on the locker tops in the cockpit. The design of the cockpit locker lids means that if you overfill the locker, when you sit on the lid/seat, the lid becomes a lever and puts massive forces on the hinge. Eventually the wood near the hinge splits and has to be replaced.

Wednesday:

Jim popped by on his rounds, he is looking after quite a few boats here, over coffee he told me he had seen my oil cooler finished in the shed at the ways, so I popped up and collected that, it looked smart with the shiny new oil hoses. Back on the boat I made a new bracket out of aloom-in-em, a metal they have over here that is very similar to aluminium 😉 

I managed to get everything back together, turned on the sea water supply and tried to turn the engine over, sadly the starter motor just whirred without engaging. Exactly the same problem I had last year when the salt water had caused a lot of rust to accumulate on the starter’s bendix. It seems all the grease and oil I had put on last September hadn’t protected it over the winter, so I’m hoping I can pull it out tomorrow and clean it up again. 

Thursday:

Starter motor cleaned up and back in the engine, and the engine turns, but won’t start. This is disappointing, it always starts. It’s going to be the fuel, it’s always the fuel. I imagine I’m out at sea, approaching the harbour and need the engine, what would I do? in fact I actually imagine what insults I would throw at someone who calls mayday in such a situation without first trying to fix the fuel problem. This is a situation every sailor should expect and be prepared for, so being tied up to the dock is a great place to have the problem. Usually it’s either bad fuel, blocked fuel lines or filters, I’m expecting to have a fuel bug, which is the worst scenario, as these things grow in your fuel as a black sludge and mess everything up. Finally the other things is that the fuel lines need bleeding, I try that first and sure enough the engine starts and runs just fine. So a lot of worry for nothing. 

Now the engine is running, time to check for water coming out of the exhaust, there’s none ( the engine is water cooled and needs hot water to squirt out the exhaust ), this always happens whenever I change the impeller. No panic, it takes a while for the water to get through the system. After a few minutes there is still no water flowing, I’m worrying about the impeller in the pump burning out, or the exhaust water muffler box overheating ,so I stop the engine. I take the repaired water pump cover off, but as I’m unscrewing the cover water starts squirting out, so it looks like water is getting there ok, I retighten the screw and decide I need more patience. Starting the engine again, and after 2-3 minutes, still no water out of the exhaust. Stop the engine, scratch my head, scratch my head again, start the engine, water gushing out the exhaust. I’m sure it does this to wind me up. Still there’s plenty of water flowing so the repaired pump is working well. Stick my head over the engine to check the oil cooler and there is oil pouring out of all the hose connections on the new cooler. It turns out I only did them up finger tight, so having fixed that I check the oil level in the transmission. I decide to be adventurous and replace the transmission (gear box) oil and clean the oil filter, I’m not sure this has been done before in the motors 20 year life. The oil filter has a metal plate over it which is painted over and joined to the engine paint, so I’m pretty sure it has never been inspected. As it turns out, it’s pretty clean anyway. And as I go to replace the cover, it slips on the oily surface and drops into the back of the deep bilge. This is probably the most inaccessible part of the boat, I have no obvious way to retrieve this, so I put my tools away and call it a day.

At this point Mark, who works in conservation over on Vancouver Island, and is having a break on his boat opposite me walks past, I tell him of my adventures and he suggests a magnet as the answer. Brilliant, I had forgotten all about the power of magnets to retrieve metal from the bottom of an oil filled void. Off to Johns to see if I can borrow a magnet, he’s bound to have one. In fact he has a telescopic magnet. While I’m there I learn lots about superconductivity and creating vacuums 

Friday:

Magnet works amazingly, plate recovered, oil changed, filter cleaned, no leaks, engine running well (ish). I’m not happy with the small amount of smoke and fuel coming out of the exhaust, I’m hoping to get a second opinion. I decide to let the engine run for a while to get it up to temperature, but I notice the temperature gauge has stopped working. Typical. It’s going to be a bad connection somewhere between the sensor and the display. That can wait, as can the engine test. I need to buy coffee, so off to the shops, then a bit of programming. I have cracked my id problem with Apple and it turns out I really am who I thought I was all along, thanks apple. Now all they need to do is join the old Paul Collister from before iCloud with the new Paul Collister after iCloud and I will be very happy. 

On the way back from the shops I spot a sailboat out in the bay heading for the harbour, it looks like a baba so I step up the pace to see what it might be. He has just tied up as I arrive and it’s an American in a baba 35, pilot house version. Quite a rare Baba, and a nice boat, sadly the varnish has been replaced with a paint like brown yuk called Cetol, which although it makes maintenance easy, isn’t my idea of a smart finish. The owner is Mike from Oregon, and later we have a good chat about Baba’s and boating, I persuade him to join our Baba yahoo group.

Saturday:

Sourdough from Victor, who I thought was a Finnish baker, but turns out to be from Valparaíso in Chile. Back to Johns to return the magic Magnet, then, as it’s turning out to be a sunny day, out with the varnish and back to making the boat pretty again.

While the varnish is drying, I service the starboard main winch, like the port winch this is in a bad way, but cleans up well. 

 Sunday:

Trip to Bere point as it was so sunny, then back to the boat to repair the port cockpit locker lid.

Bere point has orca’s visiting to rub their tummies on the pebbles. I thought I saw some, but it was hard to tell, from a distance. I focussed on one, and it turned out to be a log, rolling in the swell, then when I looked the other whales/logs had disappeared. There were signs pointing to a wedding, which I think was yesterday, however with my detective hat on, I think I may have found some evidence.

Back at the harbour Randy and Lorraine had a rope going over the side of the pier to a large fibreglass box, this was one of the floats that supports the pontoons, it had sprung a leak and was floating around the pontoons. Randy attached a rope via a block (pulley) to his truck and lifted it half out of the water so it could drain some of the water out. Next he towed it around to the big winch, which I had to operate to haul the float out of the sea. I really did feel like a grown up operating this winch.

On one evening I was strolling along the pontoons and was surprised when a voice from the dark said ‘Hello’, It was a tug-man, who had pulled into the harbour for the night and was sitting on the tugboat chilling. His tow was tied up alongside the pontoon behind him. just a barge with a few fuel tankers and a JCB on board, I wondered if he had berthed them all on his own, made me fell stupid about manoeuvring Sister Midnight around the harbour.

Next week I may well take the boat out of the harbour, which requires me to reverse about 6 boat lengths out from my pontoon, then I want to reverse back into the same space to work on the other side of the boat. I plan to try my hand at scarfing, that is, fixing a new piece of teak into the cap-rail where I smashed a chunk out on the Japanese concrete dock in Ishigaki.

I have now made some more definite plans. I’m going to haul out the boat here in a couple of weeks for about three days, paint the bottom and change the anodes.
I have booked a flight home for the 4th July and have arranged to leave the boat in Sointula.
At the end of July (Exact date TBC) Kathy and I fly back, spend a week or two in Sointula, and a week around these islands, before we head south around the west coast of Vancouver Island. We will probably take 10-15 days travelling down the west coast exploring the many rugged remote fiord like inlets. I’m hoping we will get to see some bears and other wildlife.
When we reach the bottom of the Island, we will provision for 2 weeks and head 50 odd miles offshore going south until we arrive in San-Francisco, sometime mid September-ish.

Paul Collister.

Monday 13th May

Up at 7:30, and straight into stripping the remaining varnish on the starboard caprail with my new heat gun. This was a long and quite boring day, The heat gun made easy work of stripping the varnish, but there’s so many fiddly bits and I have to move the boat’s mooring lines around a bit to access each end of the boat. I found some rot that was too big to ignore, basically before I bought the boat the rain had seeped under the teak plugs covering the screws, and had reacted with the screws and the teak and somehow rot had started. In most cases it was small and I thought I had cleaned most of it out and put new bigger plugs on, but one area was about an inch round after I scraped out the rot. I thought I would squeeze a diamond shaped plug into the rail were the rot was, it was going to be quite artistic, but very subtle, but ended up standing out terribly. I’d love to be better at woodwork,  I’m going to replace that whole cap rail over about 12ft when I get back to Asia, it’s way to expensive to do here. 

Tuesday: 

Off to shop, to stock up on drinks and chocolate. More varnishing and later I serviced the main port yankee winch. This had seized up, and I expected it to take about 45 minutes to service, but it ended up taking a couple of hours, this winch has three roller bearings on the main shaft, and 3 sets of pawls. I couldn’t see why it had seized, everything was turning ok once apart, but there was a lot of hard grease and dirt inside. Once I had cleaned, greased and oiled it all up, it wouldn’t go back together, I ended up working under a spotlight it had got so late, and decided I must have put it back together incorrectly. The next morning I swapped two cogs around and all was fine. I better do the starboard winch now as that must be in a similar state. Unfortunately, as I tightened up the final bolt on the winch it sheared off, closer inspection revealed corrosion right through the bolt just under the head, I had to make a smell surgical cut in the remaining shaft of the bolt and unscrew it. This was a slightly specialised type of bolt , 5/8th” with a hex Allen key head. A normal hex head bolt/screw wouldn’t fit in. 

Wednesday :

The co-op didn’t have the bolt I needed for the winch, but I bumped into John, a local who hails from The Hamble, who told me to follow him back to his house, and he would sort me out with a few dozen of them.  In Johns workshop, a large shed in his garden, he had lathes, milling machines, something that looked like a giant router, but wasn’t, workbenches, oxy-accetelene torches, and a stack more engineering things, quite amazing really, we walked into another room full of shelves of nuts and bolts. He produce a tray marked 5/8” Allen key bolts, which was full of exactly what I needed. Amazing, he insisted I taken a bag of 20 or so, but I insisted one was all I needed, his point was that I needed spares, so we settled on 6 of them.

Back at the boat I did more varnish stripping, the main cabin hatches this time, for the first time I think.

I also met a guy called Steve who has a small cruiser a few boats along the pontoon, he was just back from Thailand, he lives there for six months in the winter and six months here in the summer. He knew Langkawi long before it became popular with cruisers like us. We had a great chat about SE Asia and boat things. 

I finished the day off re-working my apple app ‘Findit’ so it will work on the latest IOS and my iPhone 8Plus. I wrote this solely as a way to quickly save and search the location of items stored on the boat. Over the next few weeks I will be going through every locker on the boat cataloging what I don’t throw out.

Thursday:Having completed the app so it works on the simulator I tried to get it to run on my phone. This was the start of a very few frustrating hours, Apple are so hot on security, they even had me doubting who I really was, I certainly couldn’t convince them I was Paul Collister, I couldn’t download the developer certificate I needed, and couldn’t remember the middle name of the vet who looked after my second puppy or the maiden name of my favourite teachers wife. I tried to reset my account and that required me to enter the details from a credit card that was discontinued a few months ago, and I didn’t keep any record of it. I haven’t given up on this battle, but will need a few days to recuperate before having another go.

Yesterday I received two parcels from the UK, one Isaac posted 6 weeks ago,  and one a chandler posted 5 days ago. The big parcel contained 3 meters of exhaust pipe for the heater. It was the correct size for the heater, but the previous owner had had adapters welded on to take a larger pipe, so out with the hacksaw and vice, and after a few hours the heater was running fine. Why is everything so drawn out on a boat!

Friday: It had been raining most of the past few days so I still hadn’t been able to start the varnishing, but today I did the bowsprit, Samson post and put a final coat on the table in the cockpit. Another parcel arrived with the repair kit for the engine’s raw water pump. I also met Steve an engineer who has become my new neighbour for a few days, he has a lot of experience in Volvos, so the race is on to get the engine running before he leaves, as he could be extremely helpful.

Saturday: The shiny new cockpit table gets fitted. I manage to get two coats of varnish onto the caprail in one day, which is nice.

Sunday : All the wiring is replaced in the binnacle/pedestal and everything re-assembled. It’s looking smart, at least from certain directions, from others you can see some small runs in the varnish, and hairs from the brush, which is odd as I only use foam brushes these days. 2 hours to polish all the stainless on the starboard side. The island is busy today, there’s a sporting event, I think baseball, but not sure, but lots of people visit the island, it’s a major event, so major the police send over a couple of mounties in a fast speedboat, who have a police van stashed on the island, ( the mountie bit seems redundant here) they then drive up to the game to check that nobody is thinking of driving home after consuming too much merriment at the match. It’s quite rare for them to visit apparently.

Monday: Today and tomorrow I want to get the engine back into working order. I tried to pop the shaft/bearings out of the water pump, but they wouldn’t budge. So I popped over to John’s, he had said he would help out, and in return I would help him out with an internet router problem he had. John is a proper engineer, I learnt more about mechanics in the few hours I was there today than I have in years. He had just the right bits of steel, copper, tubes, hammers etc to persuade the bearings and shaft to leave the water pump without making too much of a scene. He showed me the issue around the shaft being worn at the seal, and pointed out the fine ridge inside the new seal. It did look like there was some scratching on the shaft, but as it was, it was all fine. We rebuilt the pump with new bearings and seals and it’s sitting here waiting to be fitted tomorrow. I will also see if the oil cooler is ready for me tomorrow, and hopefully by the end of the day I should have the engine running.

In other news:

Wildfires are raging in Alberta, this is quite early in the year apparently, and more and more people are commenting on the lack of rain and how the forest undergrowth has died and is ripe for a fire here. The whole eco system is finely balanced, without the rains, the rivers aren’t deep enough for the salmon to climb and spawn, without them the bears, can’t survive, without the bears, there will be far too many tourists etc etc.

CBC continues to delight, well mostly. Last week the play ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ by Lorraine Hansberry was discussed, I saw this in liverpool some time back and was very impressed, Her life story was fascinating.

However tonight we had three millennials on discussing the ‘meme’ going around about ‘only able to complete half of your todo list’ Apparently this is something they are stressing about. I’m reminded here of Isaac and his cousin, who as kids would often say to me ‘is that even a thing’ which I was thinking listening to the show. They were complaining about how much stress millennials where under compared to previous generations, one pointed out how little time they had left after all there social media chores, to even do things like returning clothes to amazon, I was so close to throwing something at the radio! I think the host of the show felt the same way, but she held it together well.

Oh and it’s Victoria Day today, Something to do with Queen Victoria’s birthday, I think she would have been 200 this week? I had thought it was a holiday for people living in Victoria, but apparently it’s celebrated all over Canada, and in Scotland? 

Hopefully by the next blog, all of the starboard side will be varnished, the engine repaired, and I may even have motored out of the harbour and back in to get the port side alongside so I can varnish that.

Paul Collister.

I’ve noticed some of the people here seem a bit serious

Yet others seem more friendly 😉

Seriously, everyone here is very pleasant, I’ve noticed some of the locals have a reticence to become best friends with visitors on the first meeting, but warm after a while. The Island has a lot of visitors during the summer, and I expect that creates issues, good and bad.

So Monday 6th May arrives, this will be my 4th week on the boat, even though I’ve done a lot, time seems to be racing past, it’s only 7 weeks before I have to head back to the UK, so everything has to be finished in the next few weeks if I want to get the boat back out sailing before then. I am thinking hard now about my plans for the rest of the year.

So onto the engine work. The water pump had to come off so I could replace the faulty seal. I’m waiting for a new repair kit to arrive from the UK, seeing as the one I brought out is still in hiding. The pump came off without much trouble, but no longer turns, I suspect sitting through the winter with water that got past the seal and into the bearings is the problem, this isn’t supposed to happen, but the repair kit will have new bearings, so no big deal.
Next I tried to remove the Oil Cooler, without damaging it further, if possible I would like to repair it, however I couldn’t disconnect the hoses from it, they were well and truly seized tight. So I gave up for the day, squirted WD40 onto the annoying bits and left it to soak overnight. WD40 likes to take its time freeing up seized mechanical things.

Tuesday: I manage to disconnect one hose from the cooler, this allows me to get other hose off the gearbox, so eventually I get it out, but not before it’s had a good bashing. However I don’t think it had any future anyway, it’s pretty corroded.

The engine/transmission area underneath the cooler is looking a bit rough so I give it a good cleaning, it could do with painting, but it’s just too awkward to access.

The oil cooler is a heat exchanger, it intercepts the water coming in from a hole in the bottom of the boat, the engine raw water thru hull & sea cock, and then uses this to cool the oil that passes out of the gearbox (or transmission as it’s often called here) through a load of small tubes inside the cooler, and returns to the gearbox. The sea water continues onto the main engine heat exchanger, where it cools the fresh water circulating around the engine. To complicate matters further, the cooled fresh water in the engine circulates around another oil cooler, cooling the oil for an engine. It’s good that this is all an evolution from a simple engine, because if the original engineers had known this much complexity was required, I doubt they would have bothered developing a diesel engine, instead just going straight to the neutron drive.
I took the opportunity while in this area to start replacing some of the water hoses involved in the cooling system.

An early finish as I had been invited by Jim & Ivana, who had just returned from their epic road trip around Canada and the USA, to pop over to his for a bit of food and to meet Rick.
Rick is a sailor and a pilot, he flew up here in his light aircraft and left it at the airport over at Alert Bay and got the ferry here to check up on his boat. It’s called Resolution and is pictured below. It’s a cracking boat, it has a full size olympic swimming pool, a bowling alley and a cinema. Just kidding, it’s 50ft long on deck, which is 25% longer than Sister Midnight, but inside it’s at least 100% bigger. He has a workshop, a log fuelled fireplace, a lot of space lounging around. It’s a lovely boat, but very heavy, I think when full, his fuel tanks weighs more than our boat, it’s also very beamy (fat) and doesn’t go up wind to well, but he’s happy to drop the hook wherever he is and wait for a wind shift anyway.

Ivana cooked us a lovely meal and we had a great chat about boating and generally sorted the world’s problems out. Rick may be off to Mexico later this year so we may well meet up with him on the way.

Wednesday:
Below is a picture of a railway into the sea. Trolleys go on these and when the tide is in, you motor your boat onto the trolley and the trolley is hauled up the track by a giant winch, until you are out the water and you can then work on the underside of your boat.
These things are called ‘ways’ around here, and when people refer to ‘the ways’ they generally mean the marine workshop, run by Tom, who has a few ‘ways’ in his yard. so it was off to the ways, oil cooler in hand, I had a new oil cooler, but the connections where different to the volvo one, so I was hoping Tom would make me some new ones. I will return next week to see if he managed that.

There are lots of buildings like the one below on the island, most of them are Net Lofts, where fishermen can store and repair their nets during the winter or closed seasons.

Later on I spend time on Rick’s boat helping him tune up his SSB radio. His ATU seems to be struggling on various frequencies, I extend his 1/4 wave vertical by 20ft of wire wrapped around the 4 poster in his stateroom, however although it changes which frequencies we can now tune, it also causes his aircon fans to startup on their own. This not being the solution, we put it back to how it was, and it’s all working fine now. Must have been an airlock 😉

I returned to my problems, and start to hack out the exhaust pipe for the cabin heater, this had collapsed when I tried to find the leak last week, a section had corroded badly. Unable to buy any locally, I am having a new length shipped out from the UK. It looks like somebody had tried to repair it before with a new section attached with a now very rusty mild steel hose clip. This was a messy job, but once I removed the exhaust I gave the inside of the stern of the boat a thorough cleaning. It’s lovely down there, especially as I was able to remove a stack of wires and hoses that didn’t seem to go anywhere or do anything in particular.

I took the raw water filter apart and gave it a good cleaning, I could see water dribbling out of hose disconnected from water pump. This means the seacock isn’t closing off fully, not a lot of water, but it explains why the automatic bilge pump runs every now and then for a few seconds. 

Thursday and a trip to town is called for to see if I can get a few bits from the chandlery I will need next week. First though, as it’s sunny and not windy I throw up the staysail onto it’s track. It’s good to get some canvas out, tie on the sheets and remember how I used to sail this boat ‘back in the day’. The boat has a cutter sail plan, as shown below, and I generally sail with a traditional yankee/staysail rig, although on long downwind passages the yankee is replaced with a huge genoa.

Arriving in town I saw this sign, which took me back to Aisa, of course it’s still the same ocean

Friday was calm and baking hot, so I got the mainsail and yankee up. Then I strung up a hammock on the foredeck, got out the John Steinbeck book ‘The Sea of Cortez’ and had a lazy day. The Sea of Cortez is where we plan to spend Christmas this year.

Saturday was cold so I stayed indoors and did some coding. I managed to teach myself a bit more about programming in a language called Python, it’s not a new language, but it is very trendy these days as it’s handy for doing internetty things, and that was my task. After a few hours fun with version problems, environment variables and the like, I managed to connect to a remote computer in Italy and pull off a load of data, using fancy encoding and encryption, with just a dozen of so lines of code. I was impressed.

These guys below completely filled the pontoons with boat bits, while they painted the hull. They have left now, I expect they are out fishing far away by now.

Sunday: I built a wooden box for storing cockpit bits & bobs in, as the old one fell apart. It’s a bit crude, but should do the job. I washed the starboard side of the boat down and removed all of the junk off that side as Monday is the start of the big varnish job. I intend to start each day at 8AM varnishing, until I have 7 coats of varnish on and the boat is looking stunning.

I may not write anything for a bit, as it would only say,”got up, varnished, went to bed” for the next week or two.

Paul Collister

Mon 29th April 2019
I got to work early, emptied out the lazarette locker all over the cockpit and dived below to dismantle the steering system. Back in the cockpit, I fully dismantled the wheel , sprocket and all the other bits, it seemed sensible to check everything while it was in bits. One thing I spotted when I took it all apart was that the key, which is actually just a block of metal, was missing from the wheel shaft, it locks the wheel to the sprocket and without it all the force of the steering is transferred to a small bolt used to stop the wheel sliding out.
I looked around in case it had fallen out, but I wasn’t surprised it was missing, that explained the extra play in the steering I wanted to eliminate. It was worrying that the bolt could have snapped at any moment we had any rough weather and the steering got heavy. If the bolt snapped, I would be spinning the wheel with no effect, worse if I pulled back the wheel would have popped out of the pedestal all together, and whilst making a great photo opportunity, it might have been a bit upsetting for whoever was on the helm. Whilst relieved it hadn’t been a problem, I decided to get a key made from the workshop.  
It turns out, that the worst case scenario for the sheave failure played out with another member of the baba group who tells me they lost all steering and if they hadn’t had an emergency tiller handy, they may well have ended up on the rocks! 

I had removed all the bits on the pedestal including the fold up table which I now started to strip the varnish off, along with the main cabin hatch screens.

Tuesday arrived and I took the broken sheaves up to the local workshop for welding, ordered a new bit of key to be cut, and cycled on into town (town being the other end of the only main road with the co-op and baker as the only shops) for supplies, I climbed back into the lazarette and removed the quadrant from the rudder as it was looking a bit rough, I gave the inside a good cleaning and replaced some of the earthing wires that had corroded. I also checked all the sea cocks and hoses for any sign of wear.

Wednesday, I was crippled, crawling around upside down, inside out, in the locker, is really more of a job for houdini than me, so did some gentle varnishing instead. I have half a tin of very high quality Epiphanes varnish, but it’s over a year since I last opened that tin, and for some reason it doesn’t seem to keep well. But I’m too mean to throw it away, instead I filter the lumps out with a sieve, then add thinner to bring it back to life. It seems to be working well after that.
In the office I help Randy and his wife out getting openCPN running on their macbook, it seems to work well for them. Later Randy calls round with a bag of giant prawns for me.

The thing is they’re still all alive and wriggling around in the plastic carrier bag. This is not something I’m used too, and although I know how to snap their heads off and peel the shell, even de-veining is easy, I’m not keen on doing it while they are looking at me, or watching me kill their mate looking up from the bag. So I put dinner off to a bit later and put the bag in the sink. All the time I can hear them climbing over each other, and I’m working but thinking Im going to have to man up at some point and do the deed. I wait a little longer, and fortunately they seem to have gone to sleep. Just as well, as ten minutes later they are lovely pink lumps of flesh frying in garlic butter, very tasty too.

Thursday, I popped back to the workshop and collected the sheaves. The welding is just fine and the new key looked great,  I noticed a sailboat similar to mine hauled up on the trolley at the workshop and realised that they can haul me out here if needed, that gives me more fleibility

I had to file the key down a little to make it fit, but now it’s very snug. and I felt smug for fixing a major defect!
Ron, over the water on the next pontoon, who had promised me a properly cooked crab shouted over that he would take me out fishing in a few days if I wanted to learn. Even as a master fisherman already, with two catches over the last ten years, I thought it would be rude to say no, so I’m looking forward to that.

I also popped into the post office and found a letter for me had just arrived, it was my AT&T sim card I had ordered, not sure if it would work or be a dud like the last one I ordered online ,I was keen to try it out. I had to hand over the dosh for the first month online before I would find out, and the unlimited data on 4g anywhere in Canada/USA & Mexico for $65 / month sounded like a good deal. It would be a good deal, but they dont allow tethering/hot-spot outside of the USA, that’s buried in the small print. So I have lots of data, but only on the phone, so it’s not that great. However I should be able to do lots of skype/facetime stuff now without any worries about running out of data.

At some point in the week a house motored on into the harbour and starting filling its hull ( basement?) with lumber. So I have seen planes and houses tie up to the same dock as me now, what a place!
I did find out today that Newfoundland is 3:30 behind UTC/GMT. I can never understand why anyone would do this, do they know how much of a pain this is for their computer programmers, if they have any left. I couldn’t cope with that. I had wondered why they kept saying 0n cbc, and the news is at news at 11, or 11:30 in Newfoundland, I wondered why theirs was always later, silly me.

Friday, put all the steering system together and was feeling good about things, when I decided to clean more of the lazarette area. the eberspacher (diesel fired cabin heater) exhaust pipe had a soot mark behind it on the hull, in the area I had repaired back in Borneo. I tried to pull the pipe away from the hull to look at it and it crumbled in my hand with black soot and chunks of sooty matter going everywhere. Not good. There’s also an asbestossy looking material lagging the pipe inside an outer plastic casing. I’m hoping that’s ok. So after an hour of cleaning up and cutting the pipe back, I’m in need of a new exhaust pipe, which may not be easy to get here, before I can use the heater. Not to worry I have the electric one, oh I forgot, they’re shutting off the power to the marina over the next few days. Let’s hope this promise of warmer weather comes through.

Saturday, walk downtown to the shop and buy a fresh sourdough loaf. 

More varnishing, and realise I forgot a clip in the steering brake, so take it all apart again. I try to connect the throttle up and it is out by an inch from where the coupling should be, realise I put a bracket securing the cable in upside down (in fact I put it in the right way, they wanted it to be put in upside down, but that’s a small point 😉 ) So more stripping down and putting it back together. I think it’s almost done now, just need to get the block of wood under the compass varnished.

The battery charger stopped working, so I have been using the solar panels for the last few days. I decided to fix it today and noticed the cables had corroded off. I’m very confused, this is the second time in a year they have corroded off at the switch panel, I wonder if this fine malaysian cable has some problem. Once I had repaired the connections to the switch panel, it wouldn’t power up, I remember it did this before, after a while it started working, it’s like it’s sulky and will only work when it wants to.

So I think I’m close to starting on the engine work, however I went looking for the cooling pump repair kit and I can’t find it. This is the only real fault on the boat, and it’s the reason I bought this as soon as I got home in October, I packed it as soon as it arrived and I can’t remember unpacking it a few weeks ago when I arrived back at the boat. This really is a case of ‘you had one job’ I’m mad about this, did I unpack it and put it ‘somewhere safe’ here, it’s not that big a boat, but I have searched it stem to stern, twice now.
I know as soon as I order a replacement it will turn up. Such a nuisance. I may have wrapped it up inside a tee shirt for extra protection, and it will fall out when we hit tee-shirt weather, losing my memory is one thing I’m not happy about at all. On the plus side, I did find loads of great stuff I had forgot we had hidden in odd places all over the boat, however I can’t remember what they where a day later 🙁

Leaving the cockpit yesterday I tripped and bashed my knee hard, I realised I had to tidy up, and so moved a lot of crap out of the cockpit and threw a lot away. Underneath all the crap in the area where I had left the steering wheel, I found the original key for the wheel. ! Oh well.

Paul Collister

Sunday 21st April

Cold & Rainy, yet I hear it’s unusually hot in the UK for an Easter weekend. 

Fixed the shower sump pump, dismantled it, put it back together and it worked, no idea what was wrong.

Monday, 

More great radio, after a week of programmes on mental health issues, many quite harrowing stories, we have moved onto climate change debates. A great story tonight about Sudbury, now a lovely green city which was once a Chernobyl style hellhole in Ontario. Devastated by extensive Nickel mining with huge piles of sulphur waste that killed off everything in the area. A great example of industry working with residents to help each other. Other phone ins pitting youngsters against older people living in mining towns. One young teenager was saying “But we might all be doomed if we don’t act now quickly”, and a mining resident replying, “ I agree, but why should we do anything when the Chinese aren’t, and what about our jobs”. I can see this isn’t going to be easy.

Later Adam Cohen, son of Leonard was on, he sounds just like a younger version of his dad, a few thousand more Gitannes and you won’t be able to tell the difference. He was lovely and is releasing more of his fathers material that hasn’t been heard before. 

I took a long walk in the rain today, such great scenery here, even in the rain, I love the individuality of every building. I still haven’t taken the ferry over to the main Island yet, perhaps this week. 

I have noticed that one of the reasons for the wifi getting weak/strong is due to the big tides. The boat is so low, I lose site of the office aerial at low water.

Tuesday

Randy, who has the gill netter (a kind of fishing boat) over on the next pontoon shouted over that if I liked crabs he was going to be cooking a few later and I should pop over. He had cooked a load he had caught earlier that day and I confessed to my ignorance of crab eating etiquette, Ron from ‘Ron’s fishing trips’ who has a big motor launch next to Randy offered to teach me, He took a cooked crab and smashed its back on the edge of the pontoon, then ripped out the lungs, and the washed them under the tap. He told Randy that he had cooked them all wrong, but Randy shot back that Ron was from Alberta and how would he know anything about fish! A lively debate ensued, and Ron promised to get me some properly cooked Crabs. All the same they were very tasty.

Wednesday 

I have spent most of my time this week writing SQL queries and knitting it into web sites.  I had finished most of the work before I came out, but the customer asked for a load of changes at the last moment. It’s kind of OK because it’s been so cold and windy I haven’t been able to do any outside jobs anyway. And it pays for even more luxury down the road. 

I’m making notes about all the jobs I need to do on the boat, a big one I’m looking at is re-wiring to make the boat work well on 110v or 240v as we have a hacked system now but as I’m not likely to see 240v shore power power for a year or more, it seems best to get the 110v working so I can have the heater and the toaster and the kettle all on at once.

The barometer has been around 1035 for a few days now, I have never seen that before, crazy high by my standards. 

Thursday

Took the ferry to Port McNeil today, gave myself two hours to do the shopping and ended up running for the ferry back, only to find it delayed by 30 minutes. It was great to see such a choice of food in the big supermarket. There’s a small chandlers there as well, which was quite well stocked.

Fri/Sat, more programming, with a trip to the Finnish baker for a fresh sourdough loaf. He seemed to really appreciate my comments on how nice his fresh bread was, almost as if I was the first to complement him. He also makes great ciabatta rolls. On the way back I called into the Co-Op hardware store, a branch of the main co-op downtown, a really good range of boat spares, very impressive for such a small island.

More CBC Radio 1 and a great program called Ideas that featured a women called Gareth Peirce who is a 79 year old female  English solicitor and human rights activist. She spoke very powerfully about some terrible breaches of human rights and international laws/treaties being carried out by governments, including sadly, the current British government.

Sunday

More people are arriving every day and opening up their boats, getting ready for the new season. Today actually felt like spring, still chilly, but possible to sit in the cockpit and work.

This morning the radio had a program explaining the problem with relying on quantum physics, and how we have to face up to the reality that great as it is, we are probably missing the point. I’m sure we would all agree with that (could do with a puzzled looking emoji here). 

Either the radio is showing off, or they’re all dead clever here.

People are getting flooded out all over Eastern Canada right now, and they are talking about relocating whole communities away from flood plains and rivers.  Some people who were flooded last year, repaired and rebuilt as they were told it was a ‘one in a few hundred year event’, but because it’s now happened two years in a row there’s lots of talk of Climate change being responsible. I think this is bad science, but great publicity for the cause. 

I uploaded the pictures in higher resolution than normal, as I had some good internet in the week. But I think WordPress is throttling the size back and I can’t be bothered learning how this all works, but hopefully you will get a feel for how lovely the bay is here. I had a great walk around taking the snaps one evening this week.

Paul Collister

I find this new version of wordpress much harder to compose posts than I’m used to. hence a big block of pictures.

Monday 29th April.
I tried to post this yesterday, but no internet, so today I went downtown, the shop was shut, the cafe closed too, no internet available anywhere, but by the time I got back to the harbour, there was a decent wifi signal present, so I did a bit of work and posted this blog. It’s like summer today, so I have a few hours left, I’m going to rip the rest of the steering out now.

Paul Collister, Sointula.

Thursday 18th April.

I had planned to get the ferry to the big city today (well the slightly larger village over on the bigger island). I wanted to stock up for Easter, but it’s raining so hard I put this off until Saturday.

I have spent the last two days writing code, I decided that it was best to get all the leftover bits from the work I was doing back home finished so I could focus on the boat jobs. Also the weather isn’t conducive to working outside.

One job I did do was the leak in the galley. In very heavy rain or big seas water was dripping onto the worktop by the fridge. I had a similar leak on the last baba and it was a sod to fix. The water was coming in miles away and travelling along a secret route, known only to a select clan, of which I wasn’t a member. For this reason I have ignored the leak for over two years now. It was just after a very heavy downfall that I was feeling smug about how all my efforts back in Asia to reseal the chainplates and other fittings had paid off and the boat was so dry when I noticed a big puddle at the fridge and remembered that annoying leak. So I dismantled the headlining to inspect the area for clues as to the secret route this water might be taking, maybe there might be stains leading me to the problem. I couldn’t see anything so had a look directly above the drips on the outside of the boat for inspiration. Right in the spot above the leak was a 3mm hole drilled by Toshi, the previous owner. To say I was gobsmacked is understating things. How had I missed that. To be fair, it had been the route of a small power cable he had added to power a light in the spray hood, the sealant around the wire had failed. I yanked the wire out, cut it off, and then filled the hole with some epoxy. Job done, It’s been chucking it down ever since and not a drop has come in!!
The moral of that story is not to overthink some problems, often it’s a lot easier than you might realise. 

We plan to be in Mexico for Christmas, that’s roughly 2500NM south and back north a little into the Sea of Cortez. If we average 100NM/Day we can do it non stop in 25 days. Say all of November, so really there’s no great panic about anything now, we will likely leave at the start of August and have a leisurely trip down the coast. This is different for me, as since I bought the boat, there have been multiple deadlines to meet, most of them I created to force myself to get the jobs done in time for the passage across the Pacific to North America. Everything is more relaxed, and a lot more pleasant now. I’m enjoying the boat jobs more without the pressure. Having a day where I just read is now possible without any guilt.

It seems the antenna that sends the wifi out over the marina broke during the winter, so I offered my services to go on the office rooftop and fit a new one, however another boater living onboard here also offered the same, so shortly we plan to take the task on together and restore service. This I need to do as I just found out I can’t top up my pre-paid phone card unless I have a Canadian bank account or Canadian Credit Card. Great as I have used up 2.8gb of my 3gb monthly allowance in the first week. Data seems such a requirement these days, it’s worse for me because I need it for work, but I’m hoping I can reduce my dependancy on it, especially once we hit the South Pacific, where I expect it to be very sparse.

I’m picking up a bit of wifi that leaks out of the office, but it’s very slow. We did have AT&T USA SIM cards that worked great in Canada, however I forgot to top it up in January from the UK and it expired. I bought a new one online in the UK, from an eBay seller, but it was too old to be activated so proved useless. I have just order a new one online, via amazon, with a next day free delivery option, but once my postcode went into the system, the delivery time went up to 14 days!, that’s confusing as FedEx got my 25kg Anchor from Portsmouth to the boat in about 5 days! And this SIM card can be sent in an envelope from Toronto.  Well I’m not that bothered as I have a stack of books I really want to read and the internet is such a distraction.

CBC Radio1 continues to produce fantastic programmes. Last night Kieran Conway read from his book about life as an IRA freedom fighter/terrorist. Fascinating to hear his motives and a side of the story that never got a lot of press back in the UK. Alberta has a new party in control, and populism seems strong there, great debates about the climate v oil pipelines, Alberta has oil & gas reserves, but has Quebec and BC on either side, both anti fossil fuel growth, and of course First Nation issues make most news programmes. I’m slowly starting to understand the provincial/federal politics here, a central government based on a model very similar to Westminster, but a provincial model closer to that of the USA, somehow working well together.

Saturday:

Flooding is expected in Quebec, the man from the rescue services was telling people to get out now, he said “unless you have a row boat tied to your porch, you won’t have a way out when the time comes” 

Downtown was gorgeous today, warm, bright sunshine, cherry blossom just starting to appear. Interestingly the Vancouver newspaper I have been reading had a map showing every cherry blossom tree in Metro Vancouver, and the trees in my last blog happened to have been given to the city by the Japanese in 1958, I presume it wasn’t related to my arrival on the planet that year 😉 

It was so hot, I felt I should do some work today, so I have stripped down the steering pedestal, and cleaned it all up. The next step is to disconnect the cables from below and remove the ‘Adjustable Idler’ as I now know it is called. 

More great radio (there is only one station here), however I have found one aspect a bit annoying, and that’s if you miss a program then you only need to wait a day to hear it repeated, and should you miss that, it’s probably repeated the following day. Given that a lot of the programs have quite intense stuff, I’m often reaching for the mute on the remote. Saturday night brings a show by Randy Bachman, yes he of Bachman Turner overdrive fame (sorry kids, he was back in the day). His show has ok music but interesting stories relating to a lot of the artists he plays. But what is it about Canadian rock stars from that period, I’m thinking here of Neil Young as the other guy, who just can’t seem to accept the world has moved on since their heyday. What with Neil young wanting to replace MP3’s with something of higher quality, and Mr Bachman wanting Rolling Stone magazine to go back to a print edition and abandon their online publication! 

Just had a shower, tip number 1, always test the shower sump pump before you fill the shower with water. This is the third pump that has failed in the last 6 months, they are all quite old, but at £200+ each, I’m going to be broke soon at this rate. 

Happy Easter

Paul Collister

There’s not going to be a lot happening for at least 2 months as I’m not going anywhere until late May/June, just slowly working on the boat ready for the next trip to Mexico. I’m going to keep a blog going as a diary for myself and Kathy, something to read when I hit the nursing home 😉

Friday 12th April 2019

I spent most of the day cleaning the shower cubicle and head(toilet), exciting stuff eh. It took a bit longer than I hoped for because the toilet pump had been leaking so I took it apart to try and fix it, however the drip of sea water from it, that we had been putting up with for the last year or so became a steady flow after my repair. Plumbing isn’t really my thing, especially seals. Anyway rather than order new parts, I checked the spares bag and found a brand new seal, perfect, no more leaks. I was very pleased with myself for having a spare, but did wonder why I had put up with the leak for a year or more. I was even more disappointed when I remembered one of my jobs is to replace the head with an electric one this year.

I also dug out the electric heater we have had on board since I bought the boat. It’s 110V USA style, so hadn’t been of much use elsewhere, so as the shore power is supplied on a ‘as much as you can eat’ basis, I thought it was worth a try, the boats heater uses a fair bit of diesel. Sadly the heater fan didn’t work, so I thought I would see if it could be repaired. Even sadder, I enjoyed dismantling the heater, then the fan, then the motor driving the fan, then the bearing at the end of the motor. Amazingly after re-assembly, it worked well. So for just 2 hours of my time, I had saved a heater from the skip. Probably not a good deal, but fun.

I’m listening to Canada radio and they just had an appropriate joke.

Three men in a liferaft adrift in the middle of the ocean.
A bottle drifts alongside them and they grab it, once opened a genie pops out
“I will grant you each a wish” says the Genie.
The first man says, “please get me home to my family”, and in an instant he is whisked away to his family.
The second man asks for the same and also disappears to his family.
The last man says, “I don’t have any family, and I’m really lonely now, can you bring my two mates back please”!

The boat is quite tidy now, I cleaned up the quarter berth on Friday and took the opportunity to inspect the rear of the boat behind the engine, from the inspection hatch in the quarter berth. I spotted some damage to the steering system, basically a fastening that holds part of the pulley that guides the steering cable had rusted and started to rip apart. This is a real pain, I’m going to have to take the steering apart, and then remove the steering pedestal to release the plate with the rusty part. To dismantle it will take a few hours, and the same to put back together, plus I won’t know if it can be repaired until I get it all out, If I’m smart, and mark the plate correctly, I can probably get the whole thing welded up locally. It has to be done, as if it falls completely, I may well lose the ability to steer, and this kind of failure only happens when navigating past an expensive yacht in a marina.

I managed to get the bikes up and running, but I soon found out how unfit I had become sitting at a desk for the last 6 months.

Saturday 13th

The co-op which is the main store here closes at 5:30 until Tuesday, so I headed on down at lunchtime in order to get some proper supplies for the weekend. I had just put a loaf into the trolley when the lights went out. Power was out, possibly to the whole Island. The lady on the till shut the shop, put the closed sign up and explained the main till was down, but the other till was ok for cash only and would run for a short while until it’s battery ran out. I quickly filled my trolley with a few more items, made it to the till just as it shut down. That was it, we were all kicked out of the shop. I asked a lady outside how long I could expect to wait for the power to come back, she told me it used to take one to two weeks, but these days it could be fixed a lot sooner. She pointed to a huge dead seagull in the middle of the road under the power lines and explained to me that was the culprit, and the cause of the loud bang a few minutes earlier. 

A trip over the road to the petrol station showed they had no power, and wouldn’t sell me anything, odd really as I had cash, but without the till running they couldn’t serve me. Next I tried the baker, next to the co-op, he had power, he claimed he had a secret supply, he’s Finnish and I’m not quite sure he was telling the truth, but he sold me some bread, and a few cans of soda. Apparently the first chance of power returning is when an engineer might arrive on the next ferry so I will have to wait and hope for the best. Fortunately, we have a ton of tinned Japanese tuna and pot-noodles to keep me going.

Arriving back to the boat I found myself catching the middle of a program on Canada Radio CBC R1, “It’s important that the clitoris is stimulated by the penis” announced the presenter, I listened for a while to x rated detailed explanations before it became clear he was talking about Dolphins mating! It turns out they have a lot more fun than was previously thought, thinking about it, they do always seem to have a smiley face when they swim alongside us. Later on they did get onto sport proper, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear a program about the mathematical basis of Wimbledon’s ‘long play’ game, and how it worked well for a while, but was later shown to be mathematically flawed. All this in just a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon. I spent the whole afternoon listening to CBC radio whilst continuing to clean the main cabin and bookshelves, I’m very impressed, they had a great show about the importance of vaccinations, focussing on a women who caught measles on a trip to London, followed by another slot urging people to get sign up as organ donors with some great stories reinforcing the importance. 

A trip back to the co-op at 17:00 found the seagull removed and the power restored. The man at the co-op asked me if I had a number, I believe it’s normal for all islanders here to be members of the co-op and you give them your number at the till, I’m not sure why, I was told you don’t get a discount. My mum worked for the Co-Op in Moreton for many years, as I recall members got stamps which you gave to the nerdy child in your family (me) who meticulously stuck them into saving books. Presumably when you had enough full books you could claim a free onion or suchlike.

Sunday 14th

Double fried eggs on toasted sourdough bread, made by the Finnish baker with fresh coffee made for a delicious breakfast. Again the radio didn’t disappoint with a long in depth program about abuses by the Catholic Churche’s priests here in Canada. 

The next task was to make a list of jobs to do. I have been putting this off for a while, as experience tells me that a list of boat job tasks can never be completed. This list will in effect outlive me, and I hate starting something I won’t complete. Anyway, as it turns out, I surprised myself by just how many jobs I had already completed en route here. The list seems completely manageable, of course it won’t be. The main tasks I have are 

1) Engine Jobs: Fix water pump seals, weld up or replace oil cooler, Tidy up wiring and weld up steering pulleys.

2) Inside jobs: Fix deck wash pump & fresh water pump, Service water maker, Rewire mains side for 120/240V, Fit new radar, clean check chain plates.

3) Deck Jobs: Lots of varnishing, new Bow Platform, repair cockpit seat hinges, repair monitor steering, replace gas hose and fittings, repair gelcoat on cabin top where dinghy wrecked it.

4) Hull: Clean and polish

5) Haulout: Antifoul and replace anodes, hull, prop and bow thruster. Buy liferaft (should have done this last item before we left Japan, don’t tell Kathy)

Looking more closely at the problem with the steering made me realise it’s a massive job to get the broken bracket (for want of a better description) out of the boat, as a load of cables pass through a hole in it, steering, throttle,gear change, gps, bow thruster controls, power, and another fat cable I’m looking forward to finding out where it goes as I don’t think we have been acquainted yet.

The weather seems similar to back home from what Kathy tells me, cold most of the time, and not that spring like. When the clouds lift here it’s lovely, with snow capped mountains in the distance.

I spotted a lot more trees that have been washed up and tied to the shore at high tide to stop them escaping. This is the kind of thing we need to keep an eye out for when on the water.

The boat is finally cleaned up and very cosy now. I have a snippet of free wifi, and have spent today doing programming work, the boat jobs can wait a bit. I fired up the SSB yesterday and that seems to be working fine, but there’s lots of static out there.

Paul Collister