Cleaning the Diesel Tanks

Thursday 18^th November

Just for a change today it rained! I really don’t remember the last time I saw so much of it.  I can only imagine it was while I lived in Wales, because my memory of Wales, beautiful as the country is, is of gray cloudy days and rain.  This is not what I expect in Curacao.

On the bright side, there are no mosquitoes around when it is raining, and it keeps things cooler for working.  As most of our jobs are inside the boat, what the weather is doing really doesn’t matter anyway.

 Daisy out on the hard, at Curacao marine boatyard

The guys turned up at 10am to clean out the diesel tanks, not exactly “first thing” but at least they arrived.

Last night Louie stopped by for a beer, and I had whipped up a batch of prawn crackers for a snack, which filled the entire boat with a nasty greasy fat odor, a little like the local fish and chip shop.  So this morning I decided to bake a cake to hopefully make the boat smell more appealing, why did I waste my time, about 10 minutes after the guys arrived the entire boat was filled with diesel fumes…

Cleaning the diesel tanks! 

I found it impossible to do anything inside the boat, the saloon was cleared of everything to enable the men to access the diesel tanks under the floor, the galley and all the bedrooms were so full of stuff piled up on every surface so I decided to go and mark the anchor chain.

Our anchor and chain are currently resting on a pallet outside the boat, waiting for inspection, a perfect opportunity to place the markers. I spent the morning laying the chain out and fixing the markers every 20 feet.  We have tried several methods of marking the chain, and none of them have been very successful, hopefully these colored plastic pieces fitted inside the links will work.  I have worked out a colored system that will enable me to know exactly how much chain is out.

Cleaning out the diesel tanks, and filtering the cleaned diesel back into the tanks took all day, the guys didn’t finish until 10 past 5, although they had managed to take a 2 hour lunch.

I’m so excited that we can get the salon back together and start making some sense of the interior.  We hope to get launched tomorrow and we still have a number of jobs that must get done while the boat it out of the water…