Victoria Day

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.