Travel and Express?

I was sent some of the special rollers, some extra paint and instructions for the Awlgrip paint by Ocean Marine in Limassol. Rather than using Akis Express they used Travel and Express. My first time in 12 years with Travel and Express for parcels... Harris from Ocean Marine apparently sends the parcel off at 2pm so I am sitting waiting for a call. None comes all afternoon. Eventually at 5:15 I call Harris.

Harris says, 'I definitely sent it at 2pm, Travel and Express don't call you just go down there, it will be waiting... I don't know exactly where they are but they are near the marina...'

I remember seeing Travel and Express when going to get parts from Andreou Brothers. So off I go as fast as allowed... get to Travel and Express and they say, 'No this is not Travel and Express parcel office, that is the other one... you need to go to the end of the road, turn left, at the lights straight on... 800 metres it is there in front of you... quick you have five minutes they shut at 5:30'

As I come out of that Travel and Express office the heavens open and I am soaked!

I run to the car.

I follow their instructions and cannot find it. Retrace my steps, try again. No luck. Go to Akis Express wondering if the two are linked somehow. No, they are not. Get new instructions: 'Turn left at the lights, down the road then left and right and it is on the corner...' I am parked wrong side of the road at 5:30pm... navigate out through the traffic, follow their instructions. No joy.

Try again, wondering which left after the right they meant as the second left does go down to the marina and would be close to the Marina as Harris said. At the end of that road there is another taxi company. No, they are not Travel and Express they are Akropolis Taxis. Stop and ask them. 'Turn left, go to the first lights, straight on, at the bakery turn left, it is on the corner...' I follow these instructions, but they take me to the first Travel and Express office which had redirected me to the second.

OK, let's try again with their instructions: 'You need to go to the end of the road, turn left, at the lights straight on... 800 metres it is there in front of you...' I turn left at the end of the road, and get to the lights. At the lights I spot a Travel and Express transit van. As soon as the lights change I chase it... and find, yes, the Travel and Express parcel office.

The cashier is closed, but a helpful man gives me the parcel and takes the money [because I have the right change] and tapes it to the signed receipt.  Now we have the rollers and brushes and instructions for the painting tomorrow!

Grab handles and toast rack...

In order to fit the Treadmaster we have to remove all the deck fittings, especially the grab handles and toast racks. So this morning before work I went down to the boat to start that. Before I arrived Tim had been there removing more anti-fouling. If all goes to plan he will remove the last of it on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.

So... to remove the grab handles and toast racks on the foredeck you have to remove all the ceiling panels. That is an art in itself. In the for'ard heads you could not get at the nuts because there is a medicine cabinet there. So that had to come off. I don't think I had ever felt such a heavy and sturdy medicine cabinet anywhere.

Some of the nuts were difficult to shift but eventually all came off. In taking off the ceiling panels I saw that where the front vent comes through the deck from the dorade the previous owner had not sealed the deck panels so the balsa wood sandwich was exposed. That's another task for later - seal the balsa to stop damp penetration.

Having removed all the bolts I then set to to remove the grab handles and toast rack. Toast rack? These are the upright stainless steel rails around the masts that look like toast racks but are there to lean against when you adjust the sails. The toast racks were well and truly fixed solidly. I couldn't even move them 1 millimetre! The grab handles I chipped out the glue/Treadmaster under each bolt with a screw driver and then used it to lever them up. All except one. I exerted myself on that, twisted my back slightly and bent the extremely strong screw driver!

After work in the evening I came back with Tim. With his strength he moved the grab handle and with a heavy piece of wood dislodged and removed the toast racks. Well we know one thing now - when they are fixed in place they are good and solid to grab or lean against!

When is a 13A socket not a 13A socket?

I'm sitting here at the end of the day wondering where it all went... I know that I worked all day, but what did I achieve?

We had seen there were a flew blemishes in the below water line epoxy surface. So I spent some time grinding them out down a couple of millimetres ready for re-filling with new epoxy. There are not many and they are very small. They are not like the bubbles you get from osmosis, more like little chips in the surface that just need to be repaired. I have a small rounded grind stone on my battery operated drill and use that.

I went to put the battery on charge [its getting old and doesn't hold much charge these days] only to find that I had left the 220 volt system in the middle of a task. I wanted to connect up the two 13A sockets above the navigation table [only one was connected] and when I opened it up to connect the second one I had found that one was corroded and the wires could not be undone. So I bought two new sockets to replace them both and make them match.

When I removed the sockets to replace them I found that the previous owner had used non-standard 13A sockets and the new ones wouldn't fit. Ahhh... suddenly things elsewhere made sense. There were two sockets [one in the saloon, one in the for'ard cabin] that were not fixed firmly into the wall. The reason was they were the non-standard sockets and the backing plates were standard. So... I removed the non-standard sockets and fitted my new standard size ones, took the two non-standard sockets and used those in the non-standard backing plate above the nav table! A five minute task had become a one hour task. We find this a lot on the boat.

I spend some time sanding by hand the top and back of the rudder - places that the orbital sander cannot reach. I used some of the old sanding disks which I folded over on the blade of a paint scraper and painstakingly removed all the anti-fouling [and a few barnacles] from the gaps.

Final job was to trim the Sikaflex around the speed log hole. It looked very neat.

This weekend felt like we had moved forward a lot.

New windlass, fitting sea cocks, engine work and more

I went Comar Marine on the way to the boat as I wanted Sikaflex for sealing the new sea cock later in the day. I got distracted looking around. They had a very nice set of davits, which we will need sometime in the future for the tender. I also looked at the electrical panels and some of the other chandlery. I renovated the 12 volt distribution panel this year, but it will at some stage [maybe two years time] need some more serious work on it. Anyway, they only had one tube of Sikaflex, which had expired in September, so they gave it to me.

Back at King Malu, Tim was still grinding away at the ant-fouling. He reckons its building up his arms. I'm sure it is. My right arm is still not right and I get twinges every so often in my shoulder, so I'm very thankful Tim is so strong at this.

I started cleaning up the sea cock to go back into the stern cabin. I wanted it as clean as possible for the Sikaflex to stick to, and was also using light grinding compound on the inner part to make it seal with the Blakes grease.

Ken arrived and started work looking at the engine... a few minutes later Costas arrived with the new windlass.

The old 'Sea Lion' windlass is no more. We had done all we could to revive it, but eventually gave up. It started a week ago... The mechanism was stuck solid so we needed to service it. The gypsy was also needing replacing. Taking off the gypsy took some days and broke in the process. This involved squirting WD40 into it, using an engine puller and a couple of spanners as wedges. Two days work.

Next was to get into the mechanism. We turned the windlass on its end and filled up the holes with WD40. Ken said, 'Every time you pass, use the hammer and tap around all the bolts'. I decided to only do this morning and afternoon as tapping aluminium with a heavy hammer at 10pm is a good way to make yourself unpopular with the neighbours! The aim of this was that the vibration of the hammering would help the WD40 penetrate down the shafts of the bolts. So for days I had hammered the windlass when I passed.

However getting in to the mechanism proved impossible. The bolts were totally embedded into the aluminium casting. Then we found that it would be impossible to get spares so anything needed would have to be machined specially. All this meant that even though a new windlass would be expensive, it would be cheaper than maintaining the old one. So yesterday the old windlass was declared dead.

So we bought a Quick Hector windlass from Damianu Marine. Costas is a great guy. Very helpful and knowledgeable. We spend some time working out how to mount the new windlass to optimize the its action on the chain. Basically we need it as high as possible so that the chain will go round nearly 90 degrees of the gypsy. Being smaller than the old windlass we will need to raise it about 8-10 cm. We're now looking for suitable wood to make a plinth for it to be mounted on.

The other thing Costas brought was the speed log which will need to be mounted in the hull. So we cut a pilot from the inside and then with his hole cutter, cut a mounting hole from the outside. We were shocked by the thickness of the hull. Nearly four centimetres: About nine layers of glass fibre. They don't make boats like that now!

We then decided that we should empty the fuel tank as we wanted to flush out all the old diesel before trying to start the engine. This looked like an easy task. We would remove an engine room sea cock, run a pipe down from the inlet to the lift pump for the generator and siphon the fuel into a drum for disposal. The first part was easy. Siphoning just didn't work. Eventually we used the old fresh water pump to pump it out. Not very much fuel in the tank.

Ken then decided to take of the injectors for servicing. He found the washers were all missing and the injectors very carboned up. We are slowing learning more about this Ford York engine as we go. One thing we found today was where the impeller fixes. Replacing impellers is something that happens relatively frequently and sadly is not all that easy on this engine as you have to remove the oil filter to do so. Oh well...

Final job of the day was to fix the new sea cock for the galley. We had borrowed a couple of hole cutters and these proved invaluable. We were making plastic washers - approx 10 cm diametre and 1 cm thick - from an old bread board of Tim's. Cutting them to size with the hole cutters made extremely neat washers. Then we cut through the hull. Higher up this time and the thickness only about 2.5 cm thick, still much greater than a modern production yacht. Aligning the holes for the bolts proved significantly more difficult than anticipated, but we won eventually and glued the outer brass ring and bolts in place with Sikaflex, leaving it to cure overnight before doing the inside in the morning.

All in all, good days work!

Inspection by the DMS Ships Inspector

One part of registration for yachts wishing to be Cyprus flagged is an inspection by the DMS Ships Inspector. Ours happened today. The inspector arrived at 9am and looked at the hull and boat in general and decided [in not many seconds] she was strong and seaworthy.

Then he checked checked out the measurements from the Camper and Nicholson manual. Found one was missing for him to calculate the tonnage... which was distance from the bottom of the bilges to the main desk height... so measured that.

Then explained about the signage needed [brass tonnage/registration plate and yacht name placement on the hull] and then left.

Painless. Next step is he sends his report in on Monday. Then they allocate a number, send us that and the tonnage. Then we make the brass plate and fix it to the boat [we will put it next to the Camper and Nicholson build plate]. We also get the signage for the hull... the DMS come and inspect that and we are registered.

How to dispose of out of date flares in Cyprus

We had found some outdated flares and Very Pistol flares on King Malu. When I say outdated, they expired in July 1992, so they were very out of date.

I went up to see Maroulla at the Marina office. She made a phone call and told me to take them to the central police station. So off I went to the police station, a beautiful colonial style building walking distance from the marina.

The desk sergeant looked across at the flares and told me that they didn't deal with them, it was the Fire Brigade. He made a phone call and then wrote down the number for me. I asked him if he could call the Fire Brigade for me as I was sure they would not understand. 'I'm not your secretary' was the curt reply. As a true Englishman I apologized profusely.

So I went outside the police station and phoned the Fire Brigade on my mobile. I was correct they didn't understand me and connected me first to one person and then to another and another and finally to the Fire Chief.

'I have some out of date flares that need to be disposed of...'

'Explosion? Where is the explosion?'

'No, no explosion, distress flares from my boat...'

'You have a fire on your boat. Do you want me to send a Fire Engine?'

'No, no, please don't. These are rescue flares that are out of date and need to be destroyed.'

'Where are you?'

'I'm at the marina entrance...'

'OK, I will be with you in five minutes.'

True to his word the Fire Chief arrived in his bright red pickup with blue and red lights flashing within 5 minutes at the marina. He took one look at the flares and said, 'No, we don't deal with those, the police deal with them.' I explained that I had come from the police and that they were the people who had given me his number. He rolled his eyes as if to make a comment about inter-service rivalry and said, 'Come with me, we'll sort it out.'

He picked up his walkie-talkie and spoke to the fire station, explaining that the Englishman's boat was not sinking and didn't need pumping out. There was no need to send a fire engine! He explained the radio call to me since I didn't speak Greek. Then, off we walked, he in full fire chief uniform and me carrying a large bag of very out of date flares to the police station. As we walked he asked me what we called them in English.

'Flares', I replied.

'Flars', he said.

'No, flairs.' I said trying to emphasise the air not the ar.

'Ah, flars' he corrected himself.

With a twinkle in his eye he said that the Fire Brigade only put out fires, it was the Police who started them, so the flares were definitely their responsibility.

We arrived at the police station and the same desk sergeant was sitting there. I placed the bulging bag of flares back on the desk. This time the dialogue was directly between the Fire Chief and desk sergeant and was in Greek. The Fire Chief removed one of the flares and showed the desk sergeant the date. July 1992. The desk sergeant was outranked, but still maintained that they didn't deal with expired flares.

So, with me in tow, the Fire Chief went to see the Police Chief. We all shook hands. Now I had loads of fancy stars on epaulettes trying to sort out the problem of the expired flares. The Fire Chief removed one of the flares and showed the head of police the date. July 1992.

The Police Chief sent us to the head of the Criminal Investigation Department [CID]. The Fire Chief and he were also old friends and so we all shook hands. At last we were at the right place. The CID are the people who [somehow] dispose of old flares. Everyone [except the desk sergeant] had been helpful and the Fire Chief explained, 'We like to help foreigners, we do our best for all foreigners.' Thank you, yes.

They looked at the flares and asked about the dates. I explained that they had been on the yacht we had just bought a month ago that had been on the hard for eight years but the expiry date on the flares was July 1992. The eyes of the CID men nearly boggled out of their head. 17 years out of date flares is not a common sight! They handled them gingerly.

The head of CID delegated the task to one of his detectives who immediately asked to see my passport. I went off to the marina to collect it. When I returned the desk sergeant merely nodded my passing and I went to the detective concerned. He had completed a full page report about the flares, itemizing each and every flare, every smoke flare, every rocket and every Very pistol flare. Now he needed my passport number, my driving license number, my address and my phone number. Did he want the name of the boat too? Oh yes, of course and the name of the boat. They had learned administration in Cyprus at the hands of the British.

I left, thankful the for Fire Chief who had guided me around the intricacies of the police department.

Wiring almost complete...

I arrived at the boat about 9am, having hoped to be there a little before. Tim had removed more of the antifouling and it was looking great. He wanted some more sanding disks so we all went out - me, Tim and Jacob, as I wanted some extra wire.

At the shop that sells sanding disks we asked about diesel generators, as we are not sure of the health of the one on the boat. But, they only sell petrol ones. No way do we want petrol on board!

On the way back we popped into see Costas at Raymarine and Captain Alan at Seacrest Marine. We may need a new capstan so talked to Alan about that.

Back to the boat and tried to get the second battery bank working. No chance. Got out the meter and checked - no connection from the battery to the switch. So where on earth was the wire routed? Up came the floorboards... found another 120amp cable... tested that... no connection... then another 120amp cable... tested that... no connection... eventually I had 7 extra 120 amp cables in my hand none of which connected to the battery or the battery switch. So I called Stefan.

With some words from Stef and my own further delving I did find out how it was connected. Lunch time. I was discouraged. It was going much slower than I expected.

Back to work after lunch and then things went much faster than expected. By the time it was dark we had connected the three ring main/freezer circuits to an extension box ready for the consumer unit in the morning. The battery charger was now working and automatically switching on when the shore power is connected and not when the inverter is. And... the inverter was working and providing power. The battery charger remote control was showing what was happening to the batteries [including the battery and chassis temperatures] and the remote for the inverter also working.

So... hopefully tomorrow morning I will connect the ring mains/freezer circuits, connect the three 12volt circuits still pending, connect the battery monitor system and put the panels back on the wall!