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Starblazer - 13/05/2014 – A Curate’s egg



For those who do not understand, our day was good in parts but ultimately very satisfying. First I’ll deal with our biggest problem of the day, the generator yet again.



After installing the new engine in Papeete, it ran faultlessly for 50 hours until its first oil change, completed on time. 11 hours of running later we noticed it had stopped putting out cooling water on Sunday evening so quickly turned it off before any of the overheat alarms went off. Most of yesterday was spent problem solving. In the morning it wouldn’t start so John checked the fuel pump and the oil dipstick. Horror of horrors, the oil was an emulsion of oil and seawater. The manual on the generator mentions water in the oil and says in an offhand way: empty the oil, replace the oil filter and the oil, check the anti-syphon lock in the water pipe. After that John set about tracing the water feed, checking at which point the water no longer ran when he span the engine. Eventually he discovered a fractured pipe hidden away. After a worrying few hours we now have a  generator purring sweetly.



The highlight of the morning was a fish! A wahoo decided to grab the lure and John successfully wound him in. It wasn’t a huge fish but made very good eating. It’s the first wahoo we have ever caught. Late afternoon the reel started spooling out again. This time John wasn’t so lucky as the fish got away, together with the hook, lure, wire leader and expensive new swivel.



We have been making fantastic progress towards our destination. Can I moan about going too fast? I love the speed but we will probably arrive at the ‘race’ finish line in the early hours of the morning and will then have to sail around until after sunrise before we can safely enter the pass. We are currently sailing at 7.5 knots with12 knots of wind from behind. There is quite a lot of rock and roll but that would be there even if we were only drifting.



The day’s run, 10:00 a.m. Sunday (the start) to 10:00 a.m. Monday was 138 nautical Miles (nM), today’s run promises to be better as we have already covered 129 nM with another 3hrs 30 mins to go.



I forgot to include the culinary delights from the galley yesterday. Sunday evening we had chicken fajitas, quick, easy and very tasty. Yesterday we had pizza and bruschettas for lunch and pan fried wahoo with mashed potato

and stewed aubergines with green peppers in tomato sauce.



Joyce

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