The morning started badly. Helen used the head resulting in a nasty stink outside the boat. The holding tank had overflowed down the side of the boat. Looks like we had a problem all along. Thinking about how we might tackle the problem from above I realized we had two pieces of plastic pipe aboard that fitted into each other. This would be perfect for ramming down from the access port in the deck and into the tank – perhaps all the way down to the sea cock below.
I taped the pipes together lest one get left behind and started probing down. I managed to get beyond the bottom of the tank and down to the valve but there was no release of the tank contents. I briefly considered blowing down the pipe but thought better of that. I then taped the deck wash hose to the end of the pipe and ran the pump. This caused the entire contents of the tank to overflow down the side of the boat into the sea. It was disgusting. But still the tank wouldn’t empty properly. I asked Helen to cycle the sea cock a few times. It was then that we learned I’d accidentally left it closed when we were trying to fix the tank before. The tank emptied creating the typical brown cloud into the sea. We decided to refill and flush the tank a couple more times before extracting and cleaning everything.
Looking back there must have been a blockage. It takes a lot more than a day and a half to fill the tank so leaving the sea cock closed wasn’t the only problem. At least that’s sorted out now.
Next stop was the beach to go looking for fruit. We’d heard other cruisers had managed to find fruit in the trees behind and hoped there might be some left. We passed by the obvious trail into the trees behind the beach thinking that we may find some isolated fruit trees elsewhere. We scrambled through dry foliage for a while. John headed back as the flies were after him but Helen and I carried on. After a long circle we were again back at the beach having found no fruit trees.
We went back to the obvious path and found the fruit trees. There were very many lemon trees from which we collected a lot of the small lemons they have here. We also found grapefruit. small jackfruit and mango trees from which we were able to acquire some bounty. Having filled a plastic bag full of fruit we headed back to the boat. John had already swum back to Dignity.
Next effort was to look at the Hookah again. We removed it from it’s case and overfilled it with oil again. Cranking the engine with a spanner revealed some grinding noises from the air compressor section. We open that up and found lots of metal shards. It looked like some bearing casing had got all mangled up. Once this was all removed the motor turned extremely easily. We drained the oil and it fired up straight away. However, the air pressure to the regulator wasn’t what it should be at first although that improved in time.
Before lunch we headed over to Cata Fjord to visit the couple who’d swung by the previous day and invited us over. This is a 60 foot catamaran occupied by a French couple who had been racing boats all their lives and working in the boating industry. The catamaran had two masts and was very sleek. The living area was quite large and open – one could have a disco in there. We spent a while chatting before it was time to eat.
After lunch I decided it was worth cleaning out the compressor section of the hookah while we had it apart. During the cleaning I noticed that the pistons were quite loose. Fortunately I had spares so I replaced both ends of the compressor. On testing everything seemed fine. By now it was early afternoon. We decided to all go out and test the unit so we set it up for three divers and headed out.
All seemed fine for around 15 minutes until suddenly we all found we couldn’t breath. We ascended slowly and found we could breath around 20ft down. We returned to the boat at this depth and pulled everything aboard. I didn’t have the will to dismantle everything again and troubleshoot this new issue. I’m going to have to get a picture of the metal shards off to the manufacturer to see if they can provide some insight. The diagrams we have of the compressor provide no insight into what could have mangled up.
After I’d washed up lunch John and I went ashore to prepare a fire for sunset. Having done this we headed back to the boat to wait for half an hour before we all headed ashore. Claims were again made on the beach that a green flash had occurred. I’m convinced I’m destined never to see one. I was looking at the sunset like everyone else and saw just perhaps a tinge of green as it set. Nothing outstanding and more perhaps the afterimage of the red sunset.
We lit the fire. The wood we had was so light and dry it burned up quite quickly. The kids from the family boat had a good time collecting additional sticks and throwing them on the fire.
We left John’s camera equipment ashore as he’d been planning to do some long exposure night shots for months and tonight was a perfect opportunity. We ate dinner aboard then I dropped John off back at the beach with the hand held radio. Helen and I watched another Fringe episode before I returned to collect John.
Phew.
This morning we’ll head round to Baie Vaitahu about 3nm away and the village of the same name. There’s supposed to be a small museum there as well as a couple of stores and French bread.
… later …
We have now moved to Baie Vaitahu.
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