Furnishing 3 Homes

Furnishing 3 homes and work has kept me in a frenzy of activity lately, but I decided to visit the boat anyway.

The photograph depicts the morning's results (that's the port's lifeboat in the background).

Old transmission oil (mixed with diesel), cleaning fluid and garbage

First, I gave a translation the final reading and sent it off.

After that I ran the engine in gear for 10 minutes to stir and warm up the transmission oil.

Now, here's the tricky part. I read somewhere on the Internet that if you drained the oil, then added 1 litre of diesel and shifted the transmission back and forth at idle revs, it would clean out the gunk and you'd be all set again.

I was a little hesitant running the transmission filled with diesel - I mean, how much lubrication does that provide. But then, what did I have to lose?

Step 1: I poured the diesel in and started shifting, per instructions. Surprisingly, I got the old "clunk" noise back and better shifting action. I felt a ripple of pleasure and hoped for a miracle.

Step 2: Stopped the engine, drained the diesel and poured new type A automatic transmission oil into the old Hurth.

Step 3: Fired her up and it seemed to work better, but not as good as when filled with diesel. OK, but how far could you motor with a transmission full of diesel? I'd say about 2 or 3 miles.

On another note, I was told that the sailboat Sirius that collided with Jakatar a few months ago nearly hit me again. The owner is one of those "gun the engine" and hope for the best type of skippers. He lost his rudder again in the middle of the port and was towed to the outer side of the transient pontoon.
I heard he's leaving for Nazaré, what a relief.

A Long Walk

I have plans for a new project.

When I woke up on Saturday, my mind slowly flooded with ideas, doubts and hesitations about my new venture. Soon enough a battle was raging in my mind between the pros and cons of this life-changing plan.

I wish I could announce that I'm sailing to Tahiti, but no, nothing that glamorous. I'm furnishing 2 apartments and 1 house to be rented to tourists. Probably just another dumb idea, another trap and time-wasting money-losing venture. But then, that's life!

Lying in bed is the worst place to make important decisions, so I went for a long walk on a grey day. Nothing like fresh air and physical action to gain some clarity.

Here's my long walk as I saw it:

Outside town with a view of the Berlenga Islands

Fort of Paimogo

View of Paimogo Bay from the Fort's upper terrace

Stone cannon supports

Abandoned restaurant where I ate many times. The front facing the ocean is all in glass with a great ocean view.

This is why the restaurant was closed - the walls supporting the fort's yard are falling apart and rolling down the steep slope.

A rocky outcrop in the bay

OK, so maybe I'll take the same photographs again on a sunny day. Heck, we've had nothing but sunshine for months. On the other hand, this is it, real life, not a magazine article.

The project is on, I'm going to walk the talk.

The Transients Are Coming

Stopped at a gas station on the way to Peniche and bought 1 litre of concentrated antifreeze and 5 litres of distilled water (15 euros, ouch!). It costs over 90 euros to fill up the jeep, ouch, ouch, ouch! Good thing I work at home.

The transients are coming...and also leaving. Saw one leaving first thing in the morning.

This English boat was leaving when I arrived

Got the laptop set up and began the nasty job of revising somebody else's amateurish translation. Worked tenaciously until lunch, occasionally distracted by fishing boat wakes and boards clanking against steel beams whenever someone walked down a pontoon. Working quietly down below, I can also hear boat engines whining like giant food grinders even if they're 100 m away or more.

Finished the revision at about 1:00 pm, just in time for lunch. It still needed the final reading, but I'd do that after lunch and after a walk around the marina to air out my mind.

Salad, rice greens and fish fillets for lunch and...water. I drink wine at meals but decided to make boat day my water day.

During my marina walk I ran into Ryker who had been away in Holland for over a month. We caught up on new events, the usual marina gossip.

Back at the boat, I had an email concerning a 14,000-word translation for Friday (tomorrow). The agency knew that it was impossible so they asked me for my best deadline before replying to the client. My best deadline was Monday afternoon. That was no good, so they tried to spread it out among various translators, but that didn't work out either. No deal.

Gave the revision the final reading, then mailed it off and got to work on the cooling system.

Actually, all I did was mix 4 litres of distilled water with 1 litre of antifreeze and poured it into the expansion tank. Then I started the engine and added more liquid as the air got flushed out. I hadn't drained the engine block, so it took only 5 litres compared with the 8 quarts specified in the engine manual. I've been away from Canada so long I can't remember whether a quart is more or less than 1 litre. It's full, that's what matters!

[Note: a few days after this operation I learned how to drain the engine block while reading an on-line manual for a Beta Marine engine which also uses the Kubota block.]

Ran the engine for about 15 minutes and found no leaks anywhere. More water seems to be gushing out of the exhaust outlet into the ocean. Looks good.

In the meantime this beautiful Halberg Rassy came in.

Halberg Rassy 31

When I walked over to have a look, I met Ryker on the way and we both went. The skipper, a very fit and dignified looking French gentleman (you know the look) pushing 70, I'd say, had singled handed from Northern France to here.

I asked him if he was going South. Yes, but only as far as Lisbon, 45 miles down the Coast, if you count the Cascais Marina as part of Lisbon.

Apparently this gentleman had sailed about 800 miles in late winter from Northern France to visit Lisbon. "I come to visit Lisbon," he said, "then I go back home."

If I were wearing a hat, I'd take if off!

Heat Exchanger Installation Completed

Finally, I got to work on the heat exchanger installation.

Work has been slow lately and, luckily, no translations came in during the day. Good to get my hands dirty and this project over with.

It's been said a thousand times, but I'll say it again: on a boat, what seems like a 1-hour job takes a whole day!

The procedure went like this: got three clamps, drilled a hole in each one and screwed them to the engine room panel; cut some rubber strips from an old fender for protection; placed the heat exchanger in place; tightened the clamps; cut and added hoses to fit new sizes and "presto,"  I was done. Sounds like a quickie, right? Wrong!

Original location of the heat exchanger (the tube-like thing behind the engine)

New location beside the engine (the tube with the white rubber protection strips)

I don't want to bore you with details describing how it took the whole day. Let's just say that it's a tight fit requiring a lot of measuring and head scratching, kneeling and leaning into the engine compartment. Just to give you an idea, I had to hold the tube (it's not light) in  place with two ropes so I could install it with both hands, while lying on my stomach and bracing myself on the engine with my left elbow. Ouch, ouch, the engine is hard as steel.

That's where an extra arm would come in handy to brace my body - nearly fell onto the engine head first a couple of times. Spent nearly an hour looking for a gasket I KNEW was on the boat somewhere, and finally found it concealed behind a stack of charts. What was I thinking, when I put it there in a bag with other gaskets and rubbery things?

Anyway, it's done, finished, finished, over with and looks good. And just in time too, because I now have a substantial translation for Monday, meaning that I'll have to work over the weekend.

When I arrived at the marina the large Dutch sailboat was gone (they were here for  a few months), a sailboat was leaving just as I arrived and then a large luxury sailboat came in at about 4:00 pm with what looked like a delivery crew.

Youngish couple leaving early with a boat full of dreams

More Boat Maintenance

My 30-minute exercise session starts at 6:30 am. The bedroom is dark, the blankets are toasty and I have to wrench myself out of bed and up into the attic. Thirty minutes later, I'm a new man ready to face the world.

Then I drove to Peniche determined to deal with the heat exchanger once and for all.

Fishermen working on their nets

OK, so here is the heat exchanger in its original place hanging from a bunch of wires which I "engineered" last summer while at anchor in Alcoutim. Daydreaming

The boat's entrails exposed.  The heat exchanger hangs over the transmission attached by a series of wires. Don't you love my Chinese imitation Crocs.

Disconnected the hoses (one was so tight I had to cut it off) and took the end lids off. Although the intake section did not have any impeller pieces as I had suspected, it contained clusters of fibrous material. The water intake holes were encrusted and reduced in size.

The cleaned heat exchanger. Must learn how to take photographs. If the light were shining on the end you'd see what's inside instead of seeing a black hole. 

It was now about 11:30 and I was ready to visit the hardware store to look for clamps to attach the exchanger to the plywood panel beside the engine.

Checked my emails first and, sure enough, I sat staring at a translation due before 6:00.

When I finished the translation I sent it off, packed up and went home, just in time to see the fishermen loading their nets back onto the boat.

Notice how high the tide rose by comparing this picture with the first one

Kidnapped Dragon Tree

Killer translations always start with a phone call and end with my head spinning. When it's over, I'm left with a mental hangover from the constant gruelling concentration late into the night and again early in the morning. I need a drink!

I got a nasty one on Wednesday. That means I missed my boat day (Thursday), got insufficient sleep two nights in row and now, Friday, I feel like I've been trampled by a rodeo bull. But it's over.

After lunch I took a long walk to Paimogo under an amazing sunny sky and came back feeling as though I could do it all over again.Walking will cure just about anything.

It's such a magnificent sunny day that I decided to sit in the yard for a while. Our garden has various brushes and trees, but there is one that is special. It's special because we brought it from the Azores in our hand luggage nearly two years ago while visiting this wine museum on Pico Island.

Grandpa dragon tree on Pico Island

At the time I was about to translate/revise all the nine official guidebooks for the Azores, so I thought a trip there would come in handy.

Anyway, while we were at the wine museum, we found a cluster of small dragon trees and decided to bring one home. Since they can live for up to a 1,000 years, I thought it would be an incentive to live to a ripe old age watching it grow.

It was about 6 inches long, but look at it now (the one in the middle between the rocks).

Infant dragon tree kidnapped in the Azores

Now, I know what you're thinking, "that doesn't look like a dragon tree at all." In the beginning I too began to suspect that we'd been swindled, even though we didn't pay anything for it. But, according to dragon tree aficionados, they only start to branch out after about 10 years and grow very slowly.

Moral of the story, I hope I live long enough to at least sit in its shade some day.

Fort of Paimogo

Ruins on the way to Peniche. Once the home of wealthy landowners.

It's Thursday, my boat day.

I got to the marina at about 10:30 in the morning and mucked about doing nothing. Let's see, set up the laptop, the heater and the battery charger. By the time I finished doing that and some more mucking around it was lunch time.

Ever since the wind generator died, I've been charging the batteries with a regular car battery charger once per week while I'm at the boat.

I had a vague notion of reading somewhere that cheap battery chargers are no good for boats because of stray current eating up your precious metals aboard. Hum, better establish whether that's a fact or a myth.

Got the bible out, "Boatowner's Mechanical and Electrical Manual" by Nigel Calder and made myself comfortable in the sunny pilot house settee. Now that's what boating is all about!

After confirming that cheap chargers are not a good idea and while reading merely for fun somebody knocked on the hull.

It was Carlos, the harbour master, and the insurance adjuster who came to look at the gouges in the gel coat and the totally ruined windvane. (I was rammed by another sailboat)

The young friendly adjuster took some pictures, stared at the windvane for a moment and asked, "what does this do exactly?"

I'm a pro at explaining the ingenious and yet simple engineering of a windvane and he was quite impressed. Not with my explanation, with the windvane.

He left with a handshake and a smile. I'll see what comes of this, the bill is not cheap.

Spent a good 45 minutes planning on how to move the heat exchanger to another location beside the engine instead of over the transmission. Think I got it solved. On my way to the Algarve last year, the exchanger's bracket broke and the whole thing fell onto the transmission. No damage to the heat exchanger, but I suspect the transmission didn't like the extra heat much.

Ran the engine, dried the bilge and decided to leave early and visit the farm.

On the way, stopped by the fort just because I felt like it.

The old fort. Some dummies (politicians) ruined it by plastering the massive stone walls with yellow mortar. Really love the new Disneyland look of this fort built in 1674.

Here's how it looked prior to the facelift.

The original fort of Paimogo, as it was built

The fort once protected the bay of Paimogo from enemy ships.

At the farm, which is about 1 km from the fort.

Reminds me of the good old days when I actually farmed here for real.

The flat area below was once covered in greenhouses. The ocean is 300 m to the right

The jeep, a Suzuki Grand Vitara. Notice the fort in the background