Mehalah's Voyages: Resilience

Date: 7th June 2024

Location: Scarborough Marina, north of Brisbane, Australia

If you want to hear about amazing places and salty seadog tales this episode is not going to satisfy you one iota. I'm as sorry as you.

Resilience? It's been a hard two months here as we effectively carry out a refit of Mehalah after five hard years of sailing from the UK.

So, here's an example of what I mean. Yesterday's story. We are finally ready to put our sails back on. They have been washed and stored for us. David the sailman met us in the carpark. In the back of his pickup (or ute to us Aussies) were two sails, one sailbag and a stack pack. Both sails are ours. However we had given him three sails. He showed me pictures of just the two sails he said he had. I told him to look at his records. Ah, three sails. I don't know where the other one is! Maybe I gave it to your friends Meraki 2 by accident. Unfortunately they are currently in heavy weather on the way to Fiji and it is too rough for them to check their sail locker (it does seem very unlikely though). Maybe they are in the sail loft then or with the repair man. Dave said he would check. We've heard nothing yet. So, not a good start to the day.

A month ago a refrigeration engineer said he would come to re-gas our fridge which you might remember stopped working a couple of days out of Panama last year. He never turned up. So we contacted a Serbian guy who came yesterday. Bad news. It's not a gas leak it's a failed compressor. Marine replacements are VERY expensive. We discussed options and he's going to send us some quotes. There is one on eBay but who knows if it's in working condition.

Finally yesterday our repaired outboard motors arrived. Both now start. Yippee! But our favourite, the 9.8hp 2 stroke Tohatsu will no longer steer in any direction other than a straight line. The steering unit has seized through lack of use (because it wouldn't start!). The expensive mechanic said it would be very expensive to strip it down to see if it could be repaired. We decided to see if we could strip it down ourselves. Richard the amazing marina manager said we could work in his workshop. So that's where we spent the afternoon. With workshop manual in hand and YouTube videos replaying we removed the power head, lower casing, gear box and drive shaft housing. Off to the mechanic to see if he can press the steering shaft out of its casing. Ah, he's not here. That's a job that will have to wait. Instead today we've started work on the new stantion bases. Yup, you guessed it. They don't fit.

Early disassembly.

Ready for pressing out.

Anyway those jobs are minor. Most of the time since we returned we've been running two parallel streams of work; termites and other things.

Luckily we've seen no evidence of termites but they had left a lot of damage which had to be stripped out of the back of the boat and rebuilt. This entailed a combination of woodwork (John) and fibreglassing (Gill). Kevin from Meraki 2 has been amazing working with Gill and all that work is now just about complete.

Termite...

...damage.

Work in progress.

In the small space that is the lazarette.

Mixing another batch of epoxy.

The finished lazarette.

Our finished cabin.

At the same time we've been tackling the normal jobs. Again we've had help from James on Carina with hatch leak repairs, a stuck windlass, installation of a new AIS instrument, reefing line issues. The list goes on!

So tomorrow we are taking our first day off in ten weeks. We're off in our hire car to the Glasshouse Mountains around an hour away.

And then, next week, we are having our first romantic twosome holiday for many years. We have to leave Australia as a visa requirement so we are having eight days in a really nice hotel in Bali, Indonesia. We'll let you know how that turns out but we are REALLY ready for a break from incessant boat jobs.

UPDATE:

We had a great day in the Glasshouse Mountains today. Climbed one, encircled one - a good walk at last.