Engine Trouble

Monday, June 22, 2009
St Denis d’Oleron

OK, so I promised you the list of the most annoying things about sailing.

Here they are:
• The engine
• The crew
• The weather
• Missing the Archers
• Doing laundry by hand
• Having to fill the tank with water at almost every stop
• Batteries are a dark art
• No fridge - veg & fruit live in a basket
• Having to find your way into harbours you’ve never seen before with fearsome currents and big tides
• Not being able to use the loo in ports (without terrible guilt)

Of course, some of these are also the best things about sailing, especially the crew and missing the Archers. (I cheat by downloading Podcasts).

This year’s weather has been very different from the last two summers around La Rochelle. They were windy, rainy and not very warm. This year we have had a lot of really summery weather. Winds have been quite strong, and mainly in the wrong direction, so we’ve been majoring on bikes, beaches and swimming. This year I brought my wetsuit with me and so have been swimming several times. We put in a Navtex last year, and this year have been making use of it, with weather bulletins coming in overnight from UK Met office and Meteo France. We’re trying to watch the Atlantic systems and understand what we’re seeing in the clouds. We are thinking seriously about bringing Snork Maiden home in September, so understanding the weather is pretty important. The sun has lent a real holiday atmosphere to this area. This time last year, and the year before, there were very few people and boats around, but now the summer is in full swing.

Now - for today: we were up at 5, to catch the tide and sail round the Ile de Re, maybe go on to Les Sables d’Olonne… It was a clear morning with the grey dawn turning blue by 6. All ready to go, I checked the oil and found a grey sludge on the dipstick where a nice translucent black should be. It had the consistency of mayonnaise. Long story short, we have water in the engine oil, probably a leaky water pump. We found an engineer who took off the rocker case (we were too scared) and found lots more goo, and some rather rusty rocker arms. (Rocker arms should be there, rust not.) The danger is that if we don’t deal with this now, the whole engine could seize up. Now, you could say that this is a sailing boat, so we shouldn’t fret about having an engine, but it’s not quite that simple. The engine is what runs the electrics, gets us in and out of harbours, and occasionally out of trouble, or at least, saves the labour of changing sails.

The second high spot of the day was when were on the beach and saw Joshua coming in from La Rochelle, where she lives next to the Maritime Museum. For those of you who knew me in the 1980’s, you might remember that I bought a steel boat. My ‘pin-up’ was Joshua, the boat built for and sailed by Bernard Motessier in the first round the world single-handed race. In the lead, he decided that racing was not for him, and he circled the globe one-and-a-half times to get back to Tahiti. Joshua was eventually caught in an out-of-season hurricane, and Motessier died in his beloved Tahiti many years ago. Joshua has been tenderly restored (with the dents left in place as a record of her past) and is sailed by enthusiasts out of La Rochelle.

Seeing her (actually caught a line and helped moor her) was a really moving experience - hard to explain. It made me yearn for KiwiStar (my old steel boat) and stirred me with the knowledge of the possibilities for long distance sailing that a boat like that offers. And of course, Motessier’s spirit pervades the vessel. In difficult times mariners have hallucinated a pilot spirit guiding their vessel, and mine would be Motessier.

http://www.amazon.com/Long-Way-Bernard-Moitessier/dp/0924486848

Al prompted me to take her line, and go aboard to have a look below. He also took some pix so I would remember the moment. The best thing about sailing….

G’night shipmates.