Maamalni - Transition between Leg 2 & 3 - On the Road Again - On the Hard Again

Sometimes the path to the road is the hard. So what do we mean? it seems that La Libertad Ecuador is last marina with a large enough travel lift for MaaMa until Fiji or Australia and given that the "venerable" Simrad navigation system was not working again and needed a replacement transducer we were going to have to haul her out of the water. We thought it would also be a good opportunity to see what damage may have been done when we hit the rocks two days before - we really didn't think that there would be much damage as MaaMa is a big strong girl unlike some of the lightweight race boats (aka hussies or harlots) that are in the fleet. So we waited for high slack water, which is about 30 minutes in length. Michael and our 2 new guests (Jim and Kristi from Seattle aka victims) went on a tour of surrounding area and Suzan dealt with the haul out. So with 4 Spanish speaking marineros, Suzan pull up the kedge anchor, dropped the oily mooring lines and proceeded to the travel lift whereupon
the local operator insisted that MaaMa should come out "bow in" contrary to Suzan's recommendation.  So after 20 minutes of arm flailing and body bracing to keep the boat off the concrete pier on each tidal swell, the operator decided that maybe she was right and had Suzan turn the boat around and back her in. Whereupon she dropped the double back stay and disconnected and removed the wind generator and 3 antennas. The stays are the "standing rigging" that keep the mast up - so the whole procedure
of dropping and reattaching is pretty important.

As several of the other onboard technologies had decided to let go they being the watermaker, refrigerator and a deck hawser we had the opportunity to meet George Stewart, a Canadian Gringo, who is a jack-of-all-trades par excellence. He became the local shipwright after he hit a reef some 10 years and had to put his own boat back together again. You can't imagine how valuable this 'find' is until you are in a new country that makes importation of any outside material impossible. So we were elated with joy as George also has experience of rebuilding our type of systems and then put it all back together again band-aids not needed. You can well imagine that with 36 rally boats in the harbor, George was a bit overworked (the other boat's work included replacing a spinnaker track that had pulled out of an Island Packet, re-tapping the mast top of a Halberg Rassey and reattaching a keel to a Baltic 60 and of course a myriad of other small things on about 20 boats - wow, were George and
his crew tired by the time the fleet left). So with the new transducer in (and the hole sealed), we replaced the zincs, and put MaaMa back into the water. Which may have been a day too soon as the oil slick reappeared but we had to have water to run refrigeration. The tidal surge at the now abandoned dock was immense and Michael was up every two hours to tend mooring lines nonetheless, MaaMa's tail did get bruised but not as much as the dock pontoon.

Sunday was the start of Leg 3. While we were on the hard we lent our air horn to the ARC committee (amazing, they didn't have their own) to send the fleet off in a blaze of light wind, but a pretty sight nonetheless with many spectators on the shore including the Minister of Tourism and us. A mere 20 miles out, the message to the fleet "Gentlemen, Start you engines!" a cringe could be felt by those vessels with small fuel tanks.

Tuesday close of day found the good ship Maamalni with all systems up and running save one. Michael who had been nursing intestinal cramps since the tour reported from his throne in the Yacht Club head that he had a temperature of 101.1 whereupon the decision was made by crew to delay our departure another 12 hours and wait for morning.

We will get to those cleaner waters soon. Suzan and Michael