Starter is Fixed - One More Time - We Hope

Today was a red-letter day as I picked up the newly re-rebuilt starter from Bodium Engineering (that's what they call any shop that does mechanical or metal related work). They had rebuilt ours over a month ago and we had problems with it intermittently and could not get it working at all last Friday which I probably already described in a previous blog. Well, after tearing the whole ignition and battery cable system apart several times, cleaning all terminations with sandpaper and checking every wire with both continuity and voltage load tests for voltage drops, and not finding any problems, we were pulling our hair out and not sleeping well. On Friday, Bodium pronounced the starter in top form and that the problem obviously had to be on Maggie Drum.

I was suspecting the start battery which was over 5 years old, which is a good life for a start battery, but it was a high-quality spiral-wound Optima battery and I was not sure. But without a proper load tester I could not do a simple, direct test. Bodium had me so pointed in the wrong direction that I went out and got a new start battery (not cheap here) and tossed the old one since we don't have room for a spare battery running around, and that did nothing to fix the problem. This, despite the house batteries not cranking the engine, which I convinced myself was because they were the same age and running down. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It was in fact the starter and it was an intermittent problem caused by a hanging brush and a damaged commutator. I won't go in to the technicalities but it can result in an on again, off again, problem, which is what we had, although ours was mostly off. And when it did try to turn over, it was groaning like it was a weak battery. I finally got it put to bed by finding some battery jumper cables in town after a lengthy search and jumpered direct from my new, and presumably top notch and strong, new battery. Nothing! So it was the starter, so once again I took it off and back to Bodium.

P.S. - Bus rides are an interesting adventure here in and of themselves. You can flag down one of the numerous buses that go by every few minutes, or seconds sometimes, and if they are going in your general direction, they will take you right to the door of where you are going. That goes for everyone on the bus, which is a passenger van, so that you go to some amazing places on roads that donkeys might have trouble with. A direct drive to Bodium might take 10 minutes but you might be on a less direct path taking 45 minutes or more. You see areas that most tourists would never see I can tell you that, and there are zero street signs. I am not sure how the passengers tell the driver where they are going as they speak fast in Bislama (pigdin English) so I can't make it out, but they do and they go and make turn after turn up roads that you are sure will just peter out and die. You go past the shacks that people call home here - no doors, dirt floors, chickens and dogs and pigs running around, everyone barefoot, wood stoves in "kitchens" that are just smaller and more run-down shacks next to the bedroom shacks. The people sleep on mats directly on the ground. You see them picking lice off the children's hair, or off each others hair. Some yards are tidier than others, many with ornamental plants in organized gardens, but almost none have grass yards, just hard-packed dirt. And, they all seem happy as clams, weeping sores on their legs and all. And, we really like these people. They are great!

I buy a local Vila paper every morning I can from Jimmy. Jimmy has had some kind of accident and one arm has been amputated clean with the shoulder. He carries a stack of papers every morning and stands in front of the Department of Finance for Vanuatu, which I am sure is a major good location for selling papers, right across from the main market on the main street. After I had bought three papers from him and said hello, he asked me my name and gave me his and I grabbed his good hand in a "shake". He lost his right arm so it is not a normal right to right shake. Great guy and well known around town.

Well, it is blowing up a near gale out here in the mooring field and the rigging is howling and the boat rocking. We don't even pay much attention to that any more. We don't see a weather window until next Tuesday (today is Thursday here). Every day I order wind and pressure charts over the radio email that go out 10 days. You pick a target date and watch what is happening with the high and low pressure systems. If a big high gets close to a deep low, you can get a dangerous "squash" zone of very high winds and big seas between them, and this can last for several days for slow moving systems. The idea is to go to NZ when a High is directly south of here and the winds are blowing more out of the east than out of the south or south-east, which is the direction we have to go. But you need to make sure you don't run in to one of the squashes or worse weather once you are committed and on your way south as there isn't any place to go hide when you are 600 miles from anything. BTW - we felt the latest earthquake in the boat day before yesterday morning - a first for Maggie Drum. We were both laying in bed and awake at 5 minutes after six o'clock and a dinghy was going by outside, but the boat started shaking in a funny way, a way we had never felt before. Just a minor shake but definite. You notice those kind of things after being on the boat so long. Neither one of us discussed it until later and then I found out on the internet that the quake was centered south of Fiji towards NZ and way deep in the earth. No tsumani, no other damage. Very weird. We are in the Pacific Rim of Fire area so earthquakes, volcanos and tsunamis are par for the course. Thankfully, tsunamis are fairly rare.

We plan to go to New Caledonia and check in and out of Noumea. We will only stay long enough to get duty-free fuel and wait for another weather window. It looks like we could go all the way to NZ with the weather shaping up for next week but need fuel and we can't get it here duty-free as we officially checked out last Friday and don't want to check back in and out which we would have to do to get the good price. Lots of boats here are going to Australia on an annual rally called the Vanuatu to Bundaberg (Bundy for short) rally. That is a shorter and much easier passage from here and we have really considered it but still want to go back to NZ to deal with the car, but mostly because marinas are too expensive in OZ. Everything is more expensive down there. The US dollar keeps dropping in value which makes everything more expensive (and cars and trucks and gas in the US too) everywhere.

We'll post a new blog just before or after we take off. It is a short 400nm passage to New Cal which will take just over 3 days. Then the trip to NZ will be about 700nm and potentially nastier but with the shorter duration than from here, the weather is easier to pick.

----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see:

http://www.sailmail.com