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Warm beer causes death

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

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Our fridge and freezer breaks down the evening before we are getting guests from back home!

Not only are we forced to serve non-alcoholic beer (all alcohol is banned in the Maldives), which we can live with, but now we have to serve it warm, which may be difficult to live with.

Room temperature here is minimum 30C, so it will be a challenge to keep any food on board also. And as I have explained elsewhere on this web site, the resorts in the Maldives are not welcoming cruisers. Catering will be a challenge indeed.

Take a look at this link: Wife shoots husband dead for giving her warm beer.

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Hired Guns and the Shipping of Yachts

Sunday, February 13th, 2011

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– If you are serious about sailing across the Arabian Sea, you should hire a group of armed security guards.

I received this message by e-mail from the commander of one of the Coalition warships. Could it be more plainly expressed; ordinary sailing yachts cannot expect any assistance from the Coalition Forces, who are patrolling the area by 30 warships from a dozen of nations of NATO, EU and others.

Landlubbers, imagine calling the police on 911 for protection from robbers on your door step and they advise you to employ your own armed security guards instead. We are not irresponsibly cruising here in this area because of a whim; many of us are on our way home on a long journey, which in our case has lasted for more than a decade.

Read more ..

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11.1.11.11 – even better!

Sunday, January 9th, 2011

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An even more promising departure date, don’t you think (see previous post)? Only 11.11.11.11 would be better, but early November is not a good time to start on this passage – the weather would not be suitable.

Our departure from Phuket to the Mediterranean has been delayed several times now. Interesting how these last minute problems (and misfortunes in general) happen in clusters.

We’ve had both medical and mechanical incidents.

First I got this inter vertebral disk injury; a terrific pain in the small of my back combined with severe electric-shock-like pain running down my leg, which lasted for maybe 10 days although I ate 2000mg of ibuprofen a day. Then I fell over on a slippery concrete dock (with a big bag of groceries in each hand) and hurt my elbow. A week later thick, yellow, sticky fluid started to drip from the wound. Some kind of cell fluid I guess, didn’t look like abscess. I decided to start an antibiotic cure to be on the safe side anyway. Next, I flew out of the dinghy in the surf at a beach and landed on my back on the hard sand (not the same side of the back as the previous back injury). Moving around is very painful, but I hope it’s only an impact on a muscle. Luckily the dingy and outboard didn’t submerge, as they did last year in the same spot.

A severe touch of lip herpes didn’t help making my mood much better.

One of our mechanical problems worth mentioning is the break down of the engine control. Again a prime example what corrosion between two dissimilar metals (aluminium and stainless as usual) can cause. What always amazes me, however, is how skillful machinists you can find almost everywhere. Pretty much anything can be fabricated in a machine shop with basic tools.

Look at the photos. To the left is the original lever (or what is left of it) of my Morse-control. To the right is the new piece a Chinese machinist made me in a couple of hours for €35! The photos below show a close-up of the stainless set-screw which broke the cast aluminium handle, and our temporary control-arrangement.
Click here for larger view of left photo.
Click here for larger view of right photo.

Back to the heading of this post: Our latest take-off date is now 11th of January 2011 at 11:00, the day after tomorrow.

Insha’Allah.

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1.1.11.11

Saturday, January 1st, 2011

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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.

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Living in the yards

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

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We are presently in the Boat Lagoon hard standing area in Phuket, Thailand. Since we started our serious world cruising, in 1992, we have been hauling out Scorpio in 17 different shipyards or marinas – in almost as many countries. Only once have we visited the same yard twice (this was in Deltaville, Virginia, USA). Every time we have to go through the same process: evaluate the shipyard/marina, find the reliable contractors in various technical areas, hardware stores, marine chandlers etc. Everything is new, people as well as the culture. This is a complicated process but, at the end of the day, very rewarding: you really get to know places and cultures in a completely different way than tourists do.

We are definately no tourists in the usually accepted sense, trying to get our floating home maintained and improved and dealing with local small businesses. Just as an example, if you are in a yard at, say Costa del Sol, don’t buy your paint in the marina store, go to the hard ware store on the third street from the waterfront (where the local fishermen go).

There is usually also a lot of dealings with officialdom; customs, immigration, health inspections, agriculture, harbour masters etc. And usually you have to find these offices in different parts of the cities. Clearing in or out of a country may take a few days sometimes. Sometimes it is an additional challenge trying to explain why you want to leave your boat and fly home for a while (“you are not selling it here in our country are you, in that case you would have to pay tax for importing it, just to make sure we will want a bond while you are away”). And remember, the language barrier is often pretty high, they are not spelling it out as clearly as I’m doing here, and there are usually no written guide lines (as you would have arriving on a commercial jet).

But the bottom line is, that along the way we have met many wonderful people and even if we are getting poorer every time we haul out, we are so much richer with experiences – every time.

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Raising the water line

Friday, October 15th, 2010

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We haven’t posted any reports in the Log&Yarns -section for many months. This is because, since April, Scorpio has been up on the hard, where she is subject to, again, extensive maintenance and face-lifts. I will give a full report regarding all the work at a later stage, when all is finished.

This Blog-section is primarily intended for stuff unrelated to cruising, but it is convenient for short, ad hoc, writing about anything. So I thought I’d give you some ideas of what’s going on right now, here in Boat Lagoon, Phuket.


Click image for larger version

In the distorted photo above, I am trying to illustrate how the water line is being raised. This is the second time the line has been raised since the yacht left the Nautor yard in 1979. We have been carrying so much junk aboard, causing the yacht to float deeper than designed, that we decided a raise was necessary. In the picture, the new boot stripe (I think that is what the broad dark blue line is called) has already been painted. The thin blue line is masking tape showing the level of new anti fouling paint. The sanded greenish area is the old anti fouling area. The new water line will be about two inches higher that before.

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Bloody currency fluctuations

Friday, June 4th, 2010

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We haven’t been very lucky with the changings of the currency rate during the past decade. Our floating home has been located in maybe 20 different countries during this financially turbulent period and we have undertaken some pretty costly boat work. Usually there has always been an unfavourable change in the exchange rates whenever we spend more local currency than normal.

Our currency is the Euro.



The value of the Euro compared to Thailand Baht (6/09-05/10).
Click on chart for a larger copy. Source: www.xe.com.

Half a year ago (November 2009) we arrived in Thailand and decided to undertake some major repairs and face lifts on our yacht. Now, in May 2010, when the work is under way and the invoices are dropping in, the value of Euro in Thailand Baht has dropped by 20% (even before the Greek problem hit the news, the drop was 15%). If the grand total value of our projects is, say 700.000 THB, our costs have increased by 3,500 Euros.

Bad timing, wrong time and wrong place.

Unfortunately there’s not much we can do about it. With hind sight somebody could say: Hey, why didn’t you terminate the amount in November? Well, we were not committed to all the projects until we had found the right contractors and agreed on prices, and by then we were already in April when the Greek problem suddenly hit the fan. Who would buy a large amount of Thailand Bahts just for speculation?

Anyway, we have seen this phenomenon before during our voyage.

Most countries in the Americas either use US dollars or their currency is linked to the dollar. We spent several years in Central and South America, the Caribbean and on the US east coast from 2000 to 2005. We had particularly expensive boat work done in 2002 and 2003, when the value of one Euro was around 0.85 US cents. After those years, the situation became the reverse and you could buy more than 1.5 US for a single Euro. However, by then we had moved to areas outside the USD-world and had little gain because of the strengthening of the Euro.

Instead, during the time when we spent around 50,000 New Zealand dollars on boat work in 2007, the value of the Euro decreased by 20% compared to the NZD.

Same stories, different currency, tough luck – this is cruising.

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30,000 litres of water!

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

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In April we left Scorpio on the hard in Boat Lagoon Marina, Phuket, Thailand. Then we flew to Europe for a few months. A month later, included in the marina’s first monthly invoice, I was charged for the use of 30,000 litres of water!

I know that I used about 1,000 litres when filling the tanks and cleaning the yacht. I have also had a contracor peeling off the anti-fouling paint and he has used some water, but not any excess amounts. According to the my contractor, the water tap has been locked.

30,000 litres is equal to the amount that flows through our tanks in about 10 years (and we live aboard 9-10 months a year).
I have protested about this charge, but so far no reply from the marina.

Update June 21, 2010: The marina has now credited the whole water charge (did it in next month’s invoice, but never replied to my complaint). Thank you.

Posted in Boat work, Money matters | 2 Comments »

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