Monday 22 June 2009

Older, wiser?

Ah well, life continues. We are a little older and a bit wiser...

Still here in Placencia we have the VHF working again. New lights on the compass, new bulbs in the interior that blew.

It has certainly made us reassess our future plans. Not, I hasten to add, in changing any of them, but in an understanding of how the' less is more' cruising has to be the path we follow...

If we do intend to voyage to remote areas we have to be able to fix any breakages on board OURSELVES. Now some of the modern electronics just isn't up for this! Even given TBH's extraordinary talents, and brains. rewiring circuit boards is not an easy skill to aquire at sea!


So the decisions we are currently leaning to are : No autopilots. We only ever used them when motoring in no wind, usually we rely on our Monitor self-steering gear. We will invest in a couple of tiller pilots to affix to the monitor. One to use and one as a spare.

NO LED lights ANYWHERE. They do not seem fit for purpose. they may save power but they cannot cope with the conditions. Both navigation units are sealed and impossible to repair. We could have repaired the old ones!

The big problem is the ssb. I cannot envisage living without it. Email and weather info I cannot live without... we are still thinking about that one. We do realise that we should have had a good back up short wave receiver, that's at the top of the new shopping list!


The weather here in Belize continues to be pretty unpleasant. Nightly squalls and storms. Last night we sat in the cockpit for a couple of hours watching the boats drag around us...

There is a charter boat base here and some of the 'sailors' skills are obviously in the novice stage. Nothing wrong with that, we all have to learn. But we felt safer watching them in case anyone came too close. My heart went out to one boat as it spent 2 hours or more trying to get an anchor on about 10 feet of chain to bite... I longed to tell them to let everything they had out but felt it would probably be misconstrued!

We are off to isolated anchorages again to spend a few weeks formulating plans...

Monday 15 June 2009

Lightning strike

Ist June was the official start of the hurricane season and we were struck by lightning...

Lost the ssb, hence no blogging, weather, emails. Radar dead, autopilot dead, all LED lights blown. VHF aerial vaporized...

Feeling pretty shocked. We were in a quiet lagoon in central Belize and sat with wide eyes in the early morning as the world seemed to be coming to an end around us. Not a pleasant experience. Anyway the boat survived as did we. We are slowly working our way through the problems and hope we can repair some parts.

Oh and to add insult to injury the depth gauge stopped working too. Huh!