Beetles and Generators!

So, the day that I'm happily preparing for my dinner party, poor Bob was on board Daisy dealing with one problem after another, it made me realize why I prefer to be in a house ON LAND!  Any of you that are envious of our wonderful lifestyle floating around the Caribbean read on and maybe you'll change your minds, OH yes, I just remembered I'm returning to Daisy in a few weeks, so I will have all this joy ahead of me...

Always fun on board where, chaos, disorder and mechanical mayhem reign supreme

However I'm never far away with my trusty screwdriver and adjustable wrench!

This e-mail received from Bob this week.

Life is never boring on a boat! !

Late last night the x*a##?x!!  Generator refused to start ( I still believe its an intermittent fault in the emergency off switch)

I left it until this morning.   ZZzzzzzzzz

6:00am - read voltages around emergency off switch ........fiddle and after a while I got it started.

So anyway having Breakfast early and thinking how much good a simple diet will do me while I am trying to overcome this digestive disorder. Drinking Green tea and Banana porridge, all good natural ingredients, they use real bananas for flavour, look they even have the little black banana seeds in the porridge. ......wait those seeds have legs!!!!

A closer inspection showed some 30-50 beetles or weevils still in my Bowl (I had eaten 1/3 of it)

I examined the other packets in the plastic air tight container and sure enough, about 60% of the paper sachets had holes chewed on them (apple and Banana flavour, they like both)and when left quiet, after a few minutes the inhabitants come out to explore. 

I thinks weevils are healthy protein, I believe for many years we gave them to our sailors in their biscuits?

.......But maybe their eggs could be part of my digestive disorder. So these little sailors and their porridge all went swimming. 

So here I am sat down to start Breakfast again, tea is cold but never mind and its no longer early but at that moment the Generator coughs to a stop, so down I go again. 

Oh its not quite that simple, I skipped over a little distraction last night, early evening, when I was about to start the x*a##?x!! Generator, I thought I would just check around it before I started it (I had run it about 10 times no trouble since I worked on it electrical issue).   

Shit! under the generator was water. After 40 minutes of checking stuff. Concluded Header cap Pressure release valve had weakened and the coolant was expanding back into the expansion tank until it over flowed. 

  .......So an hours clean up and another hour rigging a temporary method to run Generator with the bad pressure release valve. Ran the generator, my temporary fix had worked. (It was then later in the evening when I thought I would top the batteries up, that it did not start)

Anyway while I was tracking down the source of the coolant under the generator, I at first thought it might have been a blown hose on the watermaker. So while I was all hunched up in that area I checked the hoses on the high pressure tube on the watermaker located in the cupboard under the work bench.     Shit everything was flowing in water. 

I spent 2 hours getting everything out ( all the tins of paint that would go rusty)

And drying everything out, I soon identified there was no issue with watermaker, and I remembered 2 nights ago when I was not feeling well, I missed shutting the porthole over the work bench. We had a big rain that night and in the Morning, I had to dry the water off the top of the bench. I did not realize at the time that it had also drained into the cupboard below. 

So anyway that was why I was up late and why I tried to start the generator for a 2nd time that night, when it didn't start, I left it and went to bed. 

So now I will go down and try to run to ground why the generator has stopped ........ Probably that switch, but on a boat you never know what you will find........and you certainly never have time to get Bored!!!
Bob x

"I'm so grateful for the few months of the year that I have the opportunity to be bored!"