Petronella's Voyages: Liquid Sunshine

Current Location: Grenada Marine Boatyard, Grenada, West Indies

Last night it absolutely poured with rain...all night. Liquid sunshine they call it. Liquid sunshine - my arse, this was just a monsoon-like downpour. This morning we woke up to find the boatyard afloat with shoes, heavy plastic sheets, dog bowls, jerry cans and anything else that could float. A tide line halfway up the wheels of Jack's car showed just how wet it had been. Down at the little restaurant looking out over the bay the land had eroded where the water had simply run underneath the building. Pretty amazing and not good for all those boats due to launch in the next couple of weeks.

A wet morning in paradise

We thought something was up during the night when water started to drip on my leg! Oh no. Surely not a leaking window. A couple of years ago we spent over a month taking out the old windows, welding in some new pieces of steel where water had leaked in over the years and then installing replacement windows. This was a BIG job and we didn't want to be repeating it.

So, as it dried up this morning and Gill went on a hunt for missing shoes, flip flops and hardener, I took the headlining down in our cabin. This is a hot, sticky job in temperatures of 28 degrees C and humidity of 93%. Eventually, all the wooden strips were removed and I can see a rusty hole well above window level. Thank goodness for that, it is just a hole in the coachroof. Why? Well it seems the gas pipe from the gas locker used to run through this hole but when the gas feed was moved someone did a bodge job of blocking it up. Eventually the repair rusted through, spraying water onto me. Up on deck we can see the hole is actually under the gas bottle locker. Removing the locker proved less difficult than expected and we started to clean out the hole. Just as I have the rust removed it starts to rain again. Quick, get a bucket because now it is not just drips it's a continual stream onto my bed. That's the current state of affairs and we are thinking of ways to effect a repair once things dry up again. It could be I epoxy a piece of plastic to the underside of the ceiling, find a washer of other piece of steel to fill most of the hole and then epoxy it in. not an ideal solution but it should be fine for a good few years once it is sanded down and painted. There goes another few days then. The cruising life - fixing boats in exotic places! Oh yes, the ongoing work means we now have no gas which in turn means it is cold sausage soup for lunch.

Rain outside, headlining down...and a hole in the ceiling!

Otherwise the boat is coming on quite well. All the electric works are complete and the outside (keel, topsides and white stripe) are just about finished except for antifouling the hull which we will probably leave until we return from Uruguay. Gilly's been working extremely hard on the "blue" jobs whilst I play around with fiddly stuff on board. We do have some jobs for the welder though. This is always problematic as we are in a queue with loads of other boats and progress on all of them is pretty slow. We just have to keep nudging them gently to fix the rudder pintle, free the windlass grub screw and straighten the Aries leg. Exciting stuff!

Removing salts from the green topsides

A bit of excitement yesterday. Fizzy walked the dogs down to the beach and came scampering back to say the local fishermen had caught a shark. Turns out it was a Tiger Shark. Not just a little chap either. At over 8 feet long they said it could take a man's leg off and the jaws certainly looked fearsome enough to do just that. And to think we go swimming every evening. Yikes!