LinoCat

The communication with Sopromar was tricky but they acutally worked a lot on the boat. The Bimini zippers have been replaced, even a new "soft windscreen" has been added. Props clean and newly painted with new Zinc Anodes. You can even see the price tag for 30 EUR :-) The weather is also improving ! NICE! Lenny has tried his first Cappucino, well at the least the foamed milk!

Well today was just another day at the anchorage. Ralf came over from La Medianoche for breakfast and then there was some snorkeling, some work on the boat and some snorkeling, a nap, some food, some coffee and so on. Ralf tried out his new underwater compact camera and here are his pictures. A nice eagly ray flying by. People asked me about the amount og gas, water and electricity we use: -100Liter / day freshwater -200Ah of power -2,75kg Butane gas per 21days Today i cleaned the waterline of Linocat with a sponge and i refilled the water in the batteries. They have consumed around 2 liter of water in 8 weeks. But that is OK due to heat and daily recharging by solar panels. The blacktip shark on one of the pictures below was shy and he was swimming away and so Ralf could only get him from behind and from a distance.

Well, not on the PC but on the boat windows. After a while the handles get more and more difficult to operate and so after a few years i decided to take them apart. It is just a central screw and then you can take the handle apart. Clean the window and remove old grease, dirt etc. Then take out the o-ring of the handle and clean it as well. Then lubricate it with silicone grease and put everything back together. Tighten the screw slightly and the handle will work like a charm.

From Clifton we were motoring against the wind to Petit St Vincent (PSV) where we anchored over white sand. The snorkeling on the outer reef was great. Andi dropped us with the dinghy and the current brought us back to LinoCat. There was also some work to do and so the Spectra watermaker became two new filters, a 5micron and 20micron filter element. After sooooo much work it was time for a swim again. Chris and Lani also enjoyed the 28 Celcius war water. It looked like a bath tub and it felt like one too! Lani was licking all the saltwater from the swimring and even put her face into the water. Looks a little bit like paradise....

38 Celcius on the boat. The second layer Antifouling has just been put on. The step is reinforced and hopefully ready tomorrow. The oil in the saildrive will be changed tomorrow morning. So i hope we can get in the water already tomorrow afternoon!

LinoCat is still on solid ground at Grenada Marine in Grenada. I have used the opportunity to fill the starbord side toilet with white vinegar for a few days. This is cleaning all the "remains" from the hoses. Also the one plastic step into the open part down from the helm station has been removed since it needs to be reinforced. It had a minor crack and before it breaks through i wanted it to be reinforced. The same for the teakgrill that the carpenter has made in Portugal. It is Lanis favorite place to play and it was bending through also. The saildrive oil will hopefully be changed today and we can get back in water on Friday noon latest. The plan is then to set sail to Carriacou since this still belongs to Grenada and Walter and Gitti from Bagalut are still there. I have some tools from Ralf which belongs to them and also we have not seen them for a while now. I want to do some snorkeling with them also :-) Vanora with Peter, Tina and Chico and one guest should also be s...

A while ago i had changed the coal prefilter on the watermaker and cleaned the seastrainer inlet. On the pictures you can see that this was necessary. The watermaker had 250hours and was 6 months in use. The 5 and 20 micron filters need to be cleaned next. The watermaker is still producing between 25 and 30 liters per hour depending on the watertemperature and voltage. We are consuming around 100 liter per day and that means that we let the watermaker run around 4 hours per day. It draws 10 Ampere so with our 200Ah charging per day over the solarpanels there is no need to run the engine at all. I would now consider a bigger watermaker for the future but weight is another issue. I have the gut feeling that some parameters are not set correctly since it still shows prefilters as good in the display panel.

It was looooooong time to change the toilet pump on LinoCat. But first try it out with one, so we still have one toilet left which works for sure. So the guest bathroom toilet was under maintenance today. Removing the old pump was a little big ugly since the pump and the valves did not look brand new inside and also the liquid in the pump and hoses had to be emptied. Also do not forget to close the seawater flush inlet valve if you do not want to sink your boat :-) It took around 30 minutes to change the pump and it looks like it is working fine and also that the backflow problem from the holding tank has now stopped. After trying it ouf for a few days i will replace the other one also. And it looks like Ralf really found the elctrical problem in our cabling, it was a loose battery terminal which i had overlooked. It was on the starter battery but from there connected to the housebank. Lets hope that this solved the issue.

We took our Genoa down and took it to the local sailmaker. Grenadines Sails did a good job for a very reasonable price. If you ever have some sailstuff to do i can recommend him. For 2 patches on the UV cover and some restitching we paid 85EC Dollar, around 22 EUR. And the date was kept as promised. You can contact them under gsails at vincysurf.com and Avell Davis is the guy to speak to.

Hi, the door of portside bathroom does not lock any more. The weight of the door handle is enough to push the handle down so a spring inside must have been broken or jumped out. I wanted to swap the lock against the one from the bow room but they are different from the opening side. A piece of the broken spring fell out when i took the lock out and so i know that the diagnosis was right. Now i need to get a new replacement lock since the inner part is sealed. Let´s see if i get it from Germany or in Martinique.

The parcel received with the new lids. Thanks to Andi, Tanja and Kirsten for sending it! I installed one and it stopped to smell ugly in the boat. GREAT. Also thanks for Lagoon and Siggi Straub for sending them for free! The new ones are softer but still more stable. So they are less likely to crack like the one one to the lift on the above picture.

Today Pedro came to service the engines. The last real service has been done in Holland in the Flevomarina 250 hours ago. In between there was only oil and Impeller change. The current Impellers (these are the wheels in the pump which produce the waterflow for cooling the engines) were in there for more than a year while the boat was out of the water. One Impeller still looked perfect and the other one had a crack so it was good to change them both. The one that was still OK i keep as a spare. Also every 1000hours or 4 years the mixing elbows should be changed. First i was a bit hesitant but then i agreed. So Pedro ordered the parts and came today. He also installed the speedseal covers so it is easier to remove the lid to change the impeller since in the future this will be my task. He showed me corrosion at the mixing elbow on the portside engine and so it was really time to change the mixing elbow. Also the Saildrive Oil was changed as much as you can get out while the boat is in th...

The customs in Lisbon are holding my parcel with the sparepart for more than 24hours and they have released it so it could not go onto todays delivery. Since yesterday we have finally managed to have the cable for the LED Tricolor masthead ligh IN the proper cable canal i had to rewire the light at the lower mastend inside the boat. When i tested all cables in the mast for function later i also tested the steaming light which i have coupled with the lower navigational lights. The twocolor light at the bow of the boat was dead. So this morning i was checking everything starting from the switches etc. Of course i had thought of the bulb also but if you messed around with all the cables you think that it is more likely that you disconnected one of the cables. It really WAS the bulb and around noon all was up an running. In the afernoon i was winched up the mast and so you see the tricolor/anchor light combination. To the right the black thing is the meter for the windspeed and direction a...

The part that has failed was identified as i reported in the last entry "Little problem". It was a load splitter from a swiss company called studer. The symptoms were that only one engine was loading the batteries. After talking to a technician in Switzerland he told me that with the tests he would agree that there unit was faulty. I asked him if they could send me a new one but they usually do not deliver to end customers. Since it was a factory installed equipment and i was stuck in Portugal he agreed to send me a new part directly to the marina. They would send it after they received my payment. Due to the fact that Switzerland is not part of the Euro payment agreement for fast transaction i could not do an express transfer but a normal SEPA transfer. Nevertheless, they directy sent the part without waiting for the payment. That is what i call a nice example of good customer service. They als emailed me the tracking number from TNT. 03 Sep 2009 08:11:58 Lisbon Shipment Rec...

Is till remember in India, when Anka told us that her maid has burned her passport while trying to get it dry over the gas stove. "Little problem with your passport mam". This is what i thought when i realized that the new cable for the masthead tricolor has not been placed in the tube inside the mast which is used as cable canal but just inside the mast itself. It is slamming like crazy and so today we had to fit 2 maststeps up there to then undo the complete top of the mast tomorrow. Also i realized on the way to Alvor that one Alternator (the left one) does not seem to charge at all. A little bit of measuring and testing (roughly 2 hours) and i was sure that it is the "load repartitor", a Studer MBI 2/100/3 which has died on one port. This means that one engine is giving all power to one starter battery and nothing to the main batteries or the other starter and that the other input is fine. When i switched the input cables on the alternator the other motor was no...

Hi, some people asked me what the daily routine is looking like. Today for example we got up at 8 (after a good 9 hours sleep) and i walked to the bakery to get some breadrolls. Then we had breakfast for about an hour. Afterwards i used the bicycle to try to find some CAT5 network cable to rewire the Battery meter on Linocat but was unsuccesful. I saw a HUUUGE sign which says "Super" from a distance but when reaching there it was a Super-Mini-Golf. GREAT :-( The i inflated the tyres a bit more (to 5bar) on the bike and went to a chandlery to get new line to replace the line of a fender which has been worn out. Back on the boat i replaced the line and then installed and repaired our Canon iP90 Colorjet Printer. This is a very small but neat printer and it did not pull the paper in. A small plastic part was dislocated and so i moved it back into place. Then downloading the drivers from the internet and installing them to print out the shuttle transfer and flight vouchers for ou...