No, the header is not data code, and Happy New Year to all.
As you may know cruisers tend to be superstitious. For instance, you never start on a voyage on a Friday. We have recently had some bad luck, so we thought it would be wise to choose a good departure date on our journey across the Bay of Bengal, The Arabian Sea, The Gulf of Yemen and the Red Sea, much of the route known today as Pirate Alley. We decided on 1.1.11.11, which of course is the code for 1st of January 2011 at 11am.
Unfortunately Murphy appears to be persistently aboard Scorpio lately. On New Years Eve our bilge pump broke down and as if that wasn’t enough, our primary navigation/communication computer started to have trouble with respect to conflicts between the com-ports of our chart program (running C-map) and our communication program (Airmail controlling SSB-radio via SCS Pactor 3 modem).
Therefore we didn’t succed with the 1.1.11.11, instead I spent 5 hours in the bilge this day installing a new bilge pump, that I had bought as a spare unit “just in case” (excellent planning, if I may say so myself). Problem was, that I had not been able to get an identical pump, here in Thailand, to the old one. This one had 3/4″ (19mm) hose connection ports instead of the 1″ (25″) ports on the old one, and all hoses around the bilge are 1″. For the best part of our nearly 20 years of sailing I have been carrying around an enormous amount of pieces of various hoses “just in case”, but during our recent refit I decided to free up some space and threw them all away. Bad planning!
Fortunately I had some step-up/step down hose connectors on board, but I desperately needed half a metre of 3/4″ hose to be able to connect the pump to the thinner side (3/4″) of the connectors. Just a few weeks ago I had replaced the hoses to our showers’ sump-tank pumps, which actually are 3/4″ in diameter. I decided to cannibalise on one of these (we have both manual and electric pumps in all locations anyway), but in the end I didn’t have to sacrifice the sump-tank pump. It turned out that I had used about half a metre too much hose on it and was therefore able to cut of just the piece I needed without compromising the sump-tank pump.
This is sailing
What about the computer problems? Well, I hope to get them sorted out on the way. Charts and communications are pretty important on the route we are taking during the next 3-4 months. There’s no help to be found on that track.
Anyway, we’ll try to set sail towards the Maldives again tomorrow, even though there’s little magic in the date. But it’s better than waiting until 2.2.22.22.