Friday, 18th February 2011
It rained all night again last night, but its another beautiful hot sunny morning in down town Salvador. Skipper took an early taxi to the sail loft "Vinx" and was shown over every mm of the parasail by Paulo, The boss's father, as the boss Eduardo had gone off racing yachts. They did a good job by the look of things, but, we really wont know until we fly it again. The taxi journey was gas and a 10 min journey took about 20 mins because the driver (despite having Paulo on the phone giving directions) just kept getting lost, ahhhhhhhhhhh, however, skipper agreed a price before leaving, so no meter runnig here.
Aileen went off for breakfast with Christos and Joerg, and we are going to some fancy restaurant with them as well tonight.
Back on board, skipper decided to change the oil, oil filters, annode, coolents, and fuel filter on the generator, all this took about an hour, then skipper started the engine to make sure there were no oil leaks. Ohhhh, yes, its running very nicely, and so it should, this thing will be overworked because of the batteries. However, there was water dripping out of the salt water pump to the cooling system, opppps! that not good...
We have a spare pump on board, so skipper decided to change it completely, an easy enough looking job, thats until it was being put back together, the boss just could not get the pipes to connect... frig, whats wrong here! they were too short. Oh gawd! rang Marcelo and asked him if he could get a longer pipe for a distraught skipper, what next ! ! he said he could so at least that solves that, but it would be tomorrow when he comes with the pipe, flip that!
Skipper wanders back to the boat and sat looking at this engine, with bits all over the floor....... you know how it gets. Gawd what a mess, oh how stupid! then began to think about the pump again, we checked that they were exactly the same before taking off the old one, so why are the 2 pipes not fitting back properly. Could it be on the wrong way around! So Skipper got busy again, removed the new pump, swopped all the fittings around and re fitted the pump upside down, and walla, it worked, and all the pipes fitted. Ohhh skipper, you stupid ejitt, how could you make such a fundamental error, but, but now, St Anthony was sent to find the fault and he did... now we got everything back together, started the engine again, and it was humming perfectly, and no dripping water. Skipper polished up the ss trays under the engine, put back the housings, got rid of all the rubbish and was delighted with himself again.
Shortly after, Skipper had a shower and put on clean clothes for the trip to dinner, Aileen arrived back just in time to go out again and the 4 of us, S & A, Christos, and Joerg, got a taxi to the restaurant. This was basically helpyour self to all the side dishes, such as Rockford lettuce and cheese, hot potatoes, cold potato salad, pickled onions, beetroot, cold slaw, asparagus, sauces and salad creams, and hundreds of other things we never saw before, like cold chunks of crispy smoked belly pork, crispy bacon, soft cheese balls, yoghurts, etc. etc. All to die for stuff, actually, they had most of skippers favorite foods.
But, but, the meat, was delivered to the table by the many waiters on huge 3 pronged forks, and the variety included sirloin beef, filet beef (well done, rare, or blue, or whatever way you wanted), beef on the bone, with lots of fat if required, (yum, yum) sausages, pork, lamb, chicken, and we cant remember the rest, but what a feast. The dinner took a couple of hours, while we discussed the sailing plans for tomorrow morning. It now turns out that there are only one or two suitable stops on the way to Recife, and would involve 2 nights at sea, no matter what we did.
Skipper and Aileen decided that we would rethink our leaving tomorrow for Recife. If we remain here and sail around the Islands in this wonderful bay for 4/5 days, we could still make Recife in 2 nights sailing direct.
We all had a night cap and looked over our photos on A Lady before retiring to the scratchers. An interesting and varied day.
That's it,
Signed :- Stephen Hyde ( Skipper )