You wouldn't credit it | Sailors to seadogs

You wouldn't credit it | Sailors to seadogs

Close to the wind

Fred and the tank

Fred has a lived in face, like a Christmas walnut, a knowing half smile and a quiet and measured American drawl. He’s a thick set man who moves slowly through the world in old T shirts and well-worn shorts with the residue of an engineers’ work that seldom sees a washing machine. He’s a convivial character, a quiet man, but engage him on any mechanical or seafaring issue and you could be there all day. He may have an appointment but now he’s in conversation it’s going to have to wait, there’s a story to tell, and it just may take a while.

Although Fred looks like he hasn’t got two pennies to rub together he flies a small plane, has a forty foot yacht, and houses here in Puerto Rico and another in the nearby island of St Thomas. He tells stories about being at sea on rescue tug boats, and of trouble shooting large oil installations all over the world, Fred is an uber engineer, who has a way to fix anything that’s mechanical. If Fred gives you some pearl of wisdom regarding anything mechanical, you need to listen, and listen good, his advice is probably spot on. We paid a visit to his boat yesterday which was strewn with tools as he  tackled some job or other. On the stereo an aria from some obscure opera played in the background, Fred is cultured.

Before we set off on our adventure to St Thomas Fred had warned us about our fuel tank, and how we needed to make sure it was clean. “You need to cut a hole in it” he had said, which seemed a bit drastic at the time, but after all the problems we had on that trip to St Thomas we’re now taking his advice.

There’s about thirty odd gallons of diesel in our tank, it’s about three quarters full, and lies under the floor in the middle of the boat. The plan is to empty the tank, cut a new access hole in the top of the tank, which is aluminium, and make a new hatch cover to cover the hole. This will enable us to get to the rear of the tank which at the moment is inaccessible as there’s a baffle running across the middle,  it’s there to stop the fuel sloshing about too much when the boats sailing.

Fred has given us a small sheet of aluminium and I borrowed a jig saw, from Freds’ friend Bob, to cut a new hatch cover. I spent yesterday cutting and drilling the new hatch cover, now I have to set about cutting the hole in the tank. So the next task will be to empty the tank and to do this I’ve borrowed, from Fred, a pump. It’s not a fancy pump, just an electric motor with a switch taped onto the side of it, and some plastic hose. Fred reckons it can pump about twenty gallons a minute, but here’s where it could get messy as we are going to use five gallon jerry cans to collect the diesel. It could all go horribly wrong as our jerry cans could be full in seconds spilling fuel all over the boat. But if it all goes to plan we’ll have an empty tank that we’ll be able to scrub out, and a new access hole.

Well it turned out to be more than messy, we hooked up the plastic tubes, poked one in a jerry can, and the other I held under the surface of the diesel and flicked the switch. There was a gurgling sound and a bit of foaming in the pipes but no diesel came out of the end Jackie was holding in the jerry can. Fred had said “you’ll need to prime the pump, it’s centrafugal” as if I would understand. I sort of knew what he meant so prior to starting we had poured some diesel into the pipes and filled the pump, but I obviously had missed something. We tried filling the pipes a bit more which entailed decanting, very messily, via a small funnel, a bit more diesel. Jackie holding one end up in the air, me with my finger over the other end. We plunge my end into the tank, losing some on the way and switch on, but still only a gurgle, not twenty gallons a minute, not even a trickle.

After a few repeated attempts we finally got it going, the trick was to have my end of the tube completely full of liquid and held under the surface of the smelly stuff in the tank. At last the jerry cans started to fill up and after about an hour we had sucked all the diesel out, except for a half inch that we had to use a hand pump, before mopping out the last of it with one of those towel mats you find on pub bars. Safe to say it hadn’t been the best start to a day, and we both reeked of eau de diesel, now it was time to cut the hatch, but first a fag-break out on deck where the fresh morning breeze cooled our sweaty selves.

Cutting through the aluminium tank was easy and we soon had a 9 X 7 inch hole which revealed a mess of black congealed gunge on the bottom of the rear of the tank. We set too with scrapers and metal scrubbing pads, Jackie took the rear of the tank, brave girl, I did the front half. We scrabbled about, getting into weird positions to reach all four corners, like playing some demented game of twister. It took all day but finally we had two, if not shiny, but almost pristine halves, which we decide to let air till tomorrow when we’ll put the fuel back. We go ashore for a cold beer where we meet Fred at the bar, who’s impressed that we’ve managed to get the job done, we’re just pleased it’s all over.

“You put the diesel back in the tanks yet?” says Fred, “because you know what I would do. Whilst it’s empty you should check the bottom of the tank. You just need to disconnect those four hoses and lift it out and take a look.” Well what could we say, we knew he was right, but we also knew that the tank was sitting on a rubber mat in a rank bilge that was going to mean another horrible job, but if Fred was advising us to do it, do it we must. So the next day out came the tank, which was fairly easy but it revealed a gunge ridden mess beneath it. I paddled about bare foot scooping up sludge into a bucket, mopping with rolls of kitchen towel, whilst Jackie hauled the disgusting heavy rubber mat on deck where she scrubbed it with sea water and Dr Mechanico. “This is a much worse job than yesterday” she said, and she was right.

The bottom of the tank turned out to be still in good nick, just a bit of old flaking paint, and some pitting but not badly. So with a nice clean bed for it to sit on we put the mat back down, reconnected the tank, fitted the new hatch cover, along with the old one and filled it up using the Baja filter. We went ashore for a well deserved cold beer, and bumped into Fred.

 “Shame you put it back, I could have ultra-sounded it for you” but I show him some photos and he reckons it’ll be OK. “Show Richie those pictures” Richie is sat on the bar stool he seems to occupy most of the day, another quiet man, who always says Hi, but little else. If Fred defers an opinion to Richie, I’m impressed, must be another master engineer, maybe, or just a tank expert, I don’t know. “Hell, I’ve seen worse pits on my face” says Richie. They agree that the tank should be good for a few more years. “Just make sure you keep that bilge dry” says Fred and he ambles off into the night.

So that’s the tank job, done and dusted, a major headache out of the way, and one less thing to worry about, now we just need to sort out that broken bolt on the stuffing box, replace the morse cable and we’ll be good to go, that is unless we uncover something else. As Freds’ boating friend Bob says though, “If it ain’t broke, take it apart and find out why”.

Shakedown sail, testing the mizzen

Rocket science

Picaroon has thrown up quite a few challenges in the five weeks that we've been living aboard, in Salinas bay. We arrived with a plan, which very soon went out of the porthole, whilst we solved one problem after another. First it was dead batteries, then fresh water pumps, then fan belts, the list went on, as we entered the world of being boat owners. Now we know why boats spend 90% of their time in harbour, there's always something vital that needs fixing.
On the up side, as we keep being reminded, it's better that we discover these problems in port rather than out on the open ocean, or some far flung atoll, chance would be a fine thing, and it means we've also had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with the inner workings of the good ship Picaroon. Pipes and wires snake beneath the floor hatches, disappearing through holes to some seemingly inaccessible space only reachable by midgets who were also contortionists. Tracing pipes and wires seem to have become a daily quest, to pin down how this or that system works as I slowly unravel the mysteries of Picaroon. Luckily it's only just basic plumbing and electrics, it's not rocket science.
Mind you there's stuff on here that I've got no idea what it does. Take for instance a small blue box that has the title of "Lifeline" printed on it, and a strapline beneath that reads, "the heart of you system". Shielded beneath a Perspex cover, it has a green LED that glows, and lots of wires going to it. There's a couple of holes in the Perspex lid where I'm invited insert a screwdriver and adjust the absorption voltage, and another similar hole that says, adjustment times,  along with a time test point and an error indictor lamp that fortunately is not lit. I've not got a clue what this does, but as it calls itself "Lifeline" I think I should.

There's stuff like this lurking in every nook and cranny, that may, or not be working. Even the workings of the fridge, which isn't working, baffles me, even after reading the workshop manual, I'm at a loss to see why it all looks so complicated, and that's before we get to figure the Garmin chart-plotter that's hooked up to a radar, I think, and depth transducers, all handily displayed on the friendly looking screen in the cockpit, as long as we've got the supplementary, Blue chart g2 Vision data card installed. Sonar, of course is only available with an "S" series unit.

 The thing is we did all our training with old fashioned paper charts, dividers and compasses, but the world moves on.
We've been in touch with the previous owner, via email recently, with questions about Picaroon that we thought she may be able to help us with. Yesterday, we had a reply to one or two of our queries which threw new light on the myriad of esoteric systems aboard. Apparently she was also overwhelmed by so much of the gubbins on Picaroon that used to be owned by her father.

 It turns out that her father was actually a rocket scientist, so that explains it.   

Playing the money markets

So that's it, BVI yacht sales have received our money for the final settlement of our purchase of Picaroon.
One to four days was what the banks website said and we expected it to take at least four, but no, we hit the send button on Wednesday and on Thursday we had an email saying that they had received our payment in full.

Have you ever sent a shed load of cash across currency zones, it's not without its heart stopping moments. Our money is held in a UK bank account and of course is in sterling, good old fashioned pounds to us and we had to pay the sellers in Dollars.

Now all this finance stuff is way beyond my brain but luckily Mrs W is a bit of a whiz at numbers. She somehow seems to understand stuff like spreadsheets, for instance, which baffle me beyond words, so I leave all this to her, which is how we ended up with an account with World First Bank. Now as far as I can understand they are in the business of moving money around the globe in unimaginable amounts everyday. At the top of their website it tots up the money it has moved about that day. The day we were transferring our money the ticker at the head of the page read something like £15,769,566,201,578,330.164. or some ridiculous  figure that was a bit like how far it is in light years to get to the edge of the known universe.

Somewhere lost in this enormous number is our meager contribution, which is a might disappointing as it's our life savings, which will hardly cause a ripple on the global transactions of the day which I read somewhere amounts to about three trillion dollars a day. Luckily this doesn't have to be counted or carried about by men with big sacks and vans with those blacked out slits for windows, no it's all done by computers talking to other computers, linked to other computers across the globe by fibre optic cables. Satellites whizzing above the planet about a couple of hundred miles up travelling at upwards of 20,000 miles an hour, spewing out data in a mind bogglingly endless race towards the end of the days trading on the money markets.

So here we are after Mrs W has cracked the esoteric codes, checked and rechecked the SWIFT code settings, rechecked and rechecked the three accounts that our funds have to be passed to. First our money will fly off to Wells fargo in New York where it is put on a stage coach, pulled by six white horses and at breakneck speed they get it to a bloke somewhere in a bank called First Caribbean, which I suppose is an ex cruise liner floating somewhere off the Cayman Islands, I suppose they catch a ferry from Miami to do that. Then he gets on a helecopter and takes our sack to Tortola in the BVI. Once they've counted it in the BVI bank the manager will telegraph our broker to say that our payment for that boat Picaroon has finally arrived

Maybe not, not in the 21st century.

The World First website shows us in Real Time what the going rate is for the exchange of one pound for the equivalent in Dollars. This particular day we'll get 1.6075 dollars for a pound, no wait, less than a second has gone by and we can now get 1.6077. A second later and it's 1.5987, and then 1.5998. Wizz wizz wizz go the numbers, up, up, down down all happening at the speed of light, or in this case electricity, I suppose to be wholly accurate. Then its had a sudden slide and it looks as the British  economy is pants but then you realise that the graph is split into 1000ths and that that big slide represents just less than half a cent.

Now all this matters because our funds are locked into the starting stalls of the money market race day. Our mouse hovers over the continue button. Once we click that button we get the exchange rate at that particular nanosecond. It could be the difference of £200 if we click at the wrong moment, so this is serious! After about a half hour of this mesmerising dance of numbers we give up on the idea that the rate will make so little difference in the end and we quit the game and press continue.

Thank you for choosing world First, is the next page displayed. Your money has now been sent to our Russian Mafia boss in Monte Carlo who will try to double it before sending off what remains to the recipient named below.

HAVE A NICE DAY.

Somehow miraculously Karen at BVI emails the next day to say they've received our final payment and they are preparing the final paperwork which will be shipped next week by Fed Ex. A man in a van will call at our apartment in the Dominican Republic with the ownership papers for our yacht.

Funny old world. 

The Search is over | Sailors to seadogs

The Search is over | Sailors to seadogs