The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Friday 5th - Saturday 6th January 2024

The Good … our final dinner with Liz and Will was outstanding. We went to a restaurant in Falmouth / English Harbor called Colibri, and both the food and the ambiance were excellent. We shared starters - a trio of sausages (boudin and fish) with a banana chutney, some ravioli and a lobster salad. For main course we had grilled wahoo (Liz and Gloria) or tropical tuna tartare (Will and Mike), and for dessert, crepe suzette and a lemon tart topped with meringue. We sat outside under vine covered trees, with beautiful lighting and great service. We had cocktails to start with and a bottle of Bordeaux with dinner. It doesn’t get better than that. Thanks Will and Liz!

The Bad … whilst eating breakfast in the cockpit on Friday morning, we were running the engine for the fridge and to charge the house batteries, I thought that the raw water flow (circulated sea water) from the engine cooling was less than I expected and so I decided that I would change the raw water impeller later in the day. It’s a simple enough task on paper - close the raw water intake, undo the bolts to remove the cover to the raw water pump, pull off the old impeller, slide on the new one and close it all up. In practice it’s really hard to access and you need to be a contortionist to reach the system. It’s particularly hard to get enough grip on the old impeller to pull it out and you end up tearing off the blades. At this point you realize that if you can’t complete the job you are screwed because the engine would overheat if you ran it. Anyway, with much grunting and swearing the job was finally done. The old impeller actually didn’t look too bad, but it had been 400 hours since it was last changed over the winter and so was probably due anyway.

The ugly … inevitably, changing the impeller results in some salt water spilling into the pan under the engine. That’s no big deal, just mop it up with a sponge. However, whilst doing this this I bumped my arm into a cooling water bleed valve on the gearbox heat exchanger, snapping it right off. It must have been pretty corroded, but now we had salt water leaking out of the engine at a fair rate and no easy way to fix it. I unbolted the gearbox heat exchanger and took that unit off, which in turn caused gearbox fluid to pour into the engine pan. By some miracle I was able to get the remaining part of the bleed valve screw fitting out of the heat exchanger, using a screw extractor. We jumped in the dinghy and headed to Budget Marine on shore to try and find a “bolt” of the correct size and thread to plug the hole. We arrived at the store at 4.32 pm and it had closed two minutes earlier. Thankfully, when we banged on the doors and explained our situation they let us in. We couldn’t find anything with the correct thread in the bolts section, but the lady behind the desk took the screw fitting, still attached to the end of the extractor, and was able to find a bronze plug of the correct size and thread. That seemed like miracle number two! The staff at the store could not have been more helpful. We headed back to Cotinga and had the engine re-built and cleaned up an hour or two later. It was dark by then and we were exhausted, but happy to have solved that particular issue.

It has been great having friends and family cruising with us for periods over the past few weeks. Now we are back to being on our own for quite a while, which will take a little getting used to. We brought Cotinga back to Jolly Harbor this morning and have been busy preparing to leave Antigua. We have greatly enjoyed our month here, but it’s time to move on. Tomorrow we will check-out at immigration and customs, then early on Monday morning we plan to head south to Guadeloupe.    

Before I finish, I just want to comment on our posting frequency. Th reason we aren’t posting every day isn’t simply that we are lazy, although that may be part of it, but mostly that we are reliant on cell phones to access the internet and are only switching them on every other day (to reduce roaming charges).

Mike

The following are some shots from the past several days in roughly chronological order

A wide-angle panorama taken from the bow of Cotinga whilst at anchor off Spanish Point, Barbuda. The wide-angle tends to exaggerate the distance to the only other boat in the vicinity, however, it really was tremendously isolated spot, with calm waters due to the protecting reefs.

We saw a number of squalls on the way back to Antigua, but managed to dodge them all. The light was dramatic.

Looking across the meadows to the ocean from near the top of Shirley Heights

I love dragonflies ... the closer you look the more they seem like space aliens. They eat mosquitos and pose patiently whilst being photographed ... what's not to love?

Dinghies in Nelson's Dockyard

The buildings in Nelson's Dockyard are lit up at night, and there are Christmas fairy lights in the hedges that line the road. This abstract image is a single photo captured using the camera on a tripod, with an exposure of ~ 20 seconds, whilst varying the focal length of the zoom lens