English Harbour, Antigua (2)

Sunday, March 22, 2009

We have been settling in to this little enclave. It is a national park and tourists are let off their buses at the gate outside the Admiralty Inn, then make their way into the restored dockyard, now filled with boutiques and restaurants, a museum, bakery, sailloft and yacht charter operations. Inside the park, all is lovely and there are a lot of old English ex-patriot yachties, many of whom live here on their boats year round. We met Roger yesterday afternoon. He looks after boats, and I may have him take care of Django over the summer. The cost is my idea of right and, although Antigua expereince hurricanes with some regularity, English Harbour is still the safest place to be in the Caribbean. I would leave Django tied to the magroves with several anchors our astern. Roger would look in every day and make sure all is ok. His boat is parked next door to the boats he looks after. In the fall, I will haul out here and do the bottom. The more I think about it, the better I like the idea. Better than doing the 200 some odd miles back to Grendada and paying lots of money to be high and dry all summer. Django did not do all that well by it. I have just finally figured out why the starboard engine has not had a full bore of raw water cooling flowing through it. When she dried out in the summer, the shellfish life in her intake pipe died. On launch, the dead shells went up and partially blocked the heat exchanger, taking out a piece of the pump impeller on the way. You will remember I replaced the impeller in Le Marin, Martinique, on our way down to pick up Jordie. Well, it helped a bit, but still not really up to par, so I have been poking around in the cooling system, unhooking hoses, testing the flow at various points, thinking that the impeller bit had lodged somewhere, creating a blockage. I finally decided to take off the facing plate for the heat exchanger, undid the three bolts and started to wiggle it, trying fruitlessly to detach it from the engine. In the process of manhandling the beast, I discovered the there were shells in the pipe stub, lots of them. So out with the hemostat and tweezers and removed all sorts of corruption without having to remove the plate at all. No we have a good forceful bore driving out of the starboard exhaust. Alls well that ends well.

Roger is a member of the Tot Club, as is Arnold, who runs the little cafe with his wife (friend, companion??), Gay. You will remember they live aboard next door. Their relationship is unclear to me because thay have two boats, his and hers, rafted up together. Arnold is Canadian, Gay English. They have a plot of land in BC, where they go in the summer. Arnold needs to be in Canada for six months every year to preserve his various entitlements. Anyway, the Tot Club meets everyday at six, for a tot of rum. There are about 300 members, of which about 20 regularly show up to meetings. They do good deeds. They clear the trails in the park. If a member falls on hard times, they dig deep and bail him or her out. Arnold and Gay have been very helpful in getting to know the place and for introductions to useful people.

The bad news is that the new bolt picked up in Martinique will not be going into the starboard engine. This is a long and sad tale, and the Artist is patiently waiting for me to finish so we can go in to H2O for happy hour so she can show her sketches to a kindred spirit woman she met at the cafe, from England, who had an artistic business runnig for ten years until she sold up due to ill health. So the long sad tale will have to wait. Can you bear it?