Refit #11. We did it! (30 nm)

Well, we did it, we actually left! And leaving Split means we have officially started our adventure – so this will be our last refit post :). Saturday was the day, and there was much last minute finalising of things (particularly our solar panel mount – more on this later) and faffing with the authorities and customs, but around 2:30pm we finally waved goodbye to Split!

This has not been achieved without significant additional outflow of tears (and cash) this week, and to level with you the boat is still far from “finished.” Me being the perfectionist that I am means it was REALLY hard for me to let go, so to speak, and cast our lines. I had still been holding on to the vision that we’d have Serenity literally sparkling as good as new before we set sail. But, this, it turns out, was unrealistic.

First, I am starting to come to terms with the reality that the boat will never be “finished.” There will always be things we can improve, there will always be things we are trying to eek a bit more life out of before we replace / upgrade, and there will always be things that we need parts for but have to wait until we can find them to proceed. Second, getting the boat “as good as new” is unattainably expensive. Much like how any item with “wedding” in the description is immediately 5x more expensive than the same item in a generic context, anything with “marine” in the description is £££. To be fair, in some cases this is justified – for example, pretty much all the metal on the boat must be either top grade stainless steel (316 / inox) or high grade aluminium in order to minimise corrosion, and both of these are more expensive materials. But most times it’s not justifiable; we were quoted £50 a pop to replace the small fabric blinds that cover the little port holes in the cabins. These are super basic, and not made of anything special, so they can’t cost the manufacturer more than a few quid to make… but hey it’s “marine” so chuck a few extra multiples on the price! (Needless to say we declined to buy the replacements – we reckon we can probably either fix the existing ones or make new ones for less than £5 each).

Alec read a quote from another cruiser a while back that described having a boat as “a constant battle to hold your ground against entropy.” At the time I laughed it off, but I’m coming to realise how extremely on point this statement is. Boats break. A LOT. Which is okay – everything is fixable (so I’m told). And the key is simply to stay on par with or ahead of the rate of breakage / entropy.

This sounds very simple in writing, but boy is it not in practice, at least for me. There were plenty of great examples this week, but I think the best is the engine. In one of our sailing courses, we were taught a simple mnemonic to remember all the things you needed to check each time before running the engine. It is “WOBBLE,” and goes as follows:

W – Water: Is the strainer for the raw water intake free of debris? Is there sufficient coolant in the tank?

O – Oil: Is the oil level normal?

B – Belts: Are the belts appropriately tight and in good condition?

B – Bilge: Are there any signs of leaks or anything else in the bilge?

L – Look: General look over the engine and its associated parts. Do they all look in good working order? Anything unusual to note?

E – Exhaust: When you start the engine, is there water coming out of the exhaust pipe (I know this sounds weird, but on boat engines the seawater used to cool the engine is expelled with the exhaust)

When I do a check using this mnemonic, I’ll be honest that I normally don’t give “Look” much of the time of day. And we just spent an arm and a leg to get a full professional service done on the engine. But as it hadn’t been run in a while and I generally like to be thorough, I did a very detailed look-over of the whole engine system as part of our test sail last weekend. This annoyingly cropped up two issues that started flashing alarms in my head. First, one of the coolant hoses had been oddly positioned and was chafing against the side of the engine. At the chafe point, the hose was +75% worn through. The coolant running through this hose is under pressure and HOT, so this is not an occasion where a bit of duct tape would fix it in the event of failure (not that this has stopped me putting some duct tape on anyway, just in case). Second, I noticed that the final few meters of the exhaust hose before it connects to its outlet were badly chafed. It was clear that the original mounting points for the hose must have broken, and the boats’ previous owners couldn’t be arsed to make a proper fix, because the whole thing was roughly tied in place with shoelaces…

Now, unhelpfully, these two items are both very expensive and very hard to source. I had more than one teary breakdown about them, despairing that I’d probably missed other things too and we must be destined to have engine failure at the most inopportune time. Many calming words from Alec and much feverish testing later, I finally decided to inch into the unknown and just monitor these issues closely for a few weeks while we sail and look to source the parts at a future port, rather than hold us up for two more weeks while I tried to get the parts now. I am in the process of contacting places in Dubrovnik, where I know we’ll be in a week’s time, to see if I can pre-order these items in so they are waiting for us there. And until then just carefully checking the hoses each morning and regularly while the engine is running to ensure if something does go wrong I catch it straight away. This maybe seems like an incredibly minute thing, but for me it has been a huge mental hurdle to try to overcome. Knowing that the engine is not only not perfect but genuinely needing fixing, and being okay with letting that go for a short while… it goes against all my instincts! But being okay with this kind of thing is essential to sailing, or else we couldn’t do much if any sailing – so I’m practicing!

Despite this difficulty with the engine, spirits were quite high by the time we left because our solar panel mount, the thing we specifically waited one more week in port so it could be finished, finally came to be!! We’re getting used to the “mañana” culture here in Croatia, so we didn’t panic too much when, after initially saying he’d be done on Wednesday, 8pm on Friday approached and we’d still seen no sign of arch or welder. I really empathised with him though, because he is as much a perfectionist as me – he was late because he spent so much time making the arch the most perfect, beautiful piece of welding you’ve seen. A few stern words (i.e. “we’re leaving at 10am on Saturday and if you haven’t installed it by then we won’t pay you”) lit a bit of a fire and he was finally with us by 7am Saturday to put everything together. He spent a good two hours measuring, adjusting, shaping, etc. before he was finally ready to actually weld, but we got there in the end.

About 9:30, he’d finished his welding and had put some special acid on the welds to help them “cure” and prevent them from rusting in the future. This needs to sit for 10-20 minutes, so we suggested that during this time our welder friend perhaps should nip back to his workshop to pick up the bits he’d forgotten (some metal plates and pieces of our anchor platform we’d had him do a bit of work on – to be discussed more in a future post). He dashed off, and then one of our friends from the marina, Tomo (who runs operations for the charter company that operates out of the marina), wandered by and suggested perhaps we should just cast off and not pay the welder – but we are honest people so we didn’t do that.

It was a bit of a whirlwind week, so I have to confess I didn’t document it as well as I would have liked. But, one other fun story from the week was our continued quest to identify and fix the source of the leak on our boat. Yes, we have a leak. I am told this is common. Interestingly, our leak is not a seawater leak (in a way annoying because that might have been easier to diagnose the cause of, given the relatively limited points where seawater could enter), but a leak from our freshwater system. I say “is” because we have not managed to fix it yet, despite much effort.

Alec awoke with purpose one morning mid-week and decided that this would be the day the leak finally saw its end. After just a few minutes, he gleefully declared that he’d identified its source – the tap in one of the bathrooms (“heads”). I had a look and, yep, it was definitely leaking. Not a lot, but we knew the leak was a slow one, so it seemed to fit.

Just to back up quickly, I’ll explain how we knew we had a leak. The bottom inside part of the boat (the “bilge”) is all connected to a central point, where any water (or other stuff) that has leaked in congregates. This makes it easy to see if you’ve got any ingress and also gives a central point from which it can be pumped out. All boats have some sort of sensor switch in this spot that automatically turns on an electric pump if the level gets to a certain point. Our boat has a ‘float switch,’ which is one of those wonderful inventions that addresses a problem in a beautifully simple fashion. It has a hollow casing that is fixed at one end. As the water level rises, the end that is not fixed floats up with the water level. When it gets high enough, a little ball inside the casing rolls down to the back and creates a connection that turns on the pump. It stays on until the level has gone down far enough for the ball to roll back to the other side.

We’d noticed our pump was coming on once per day. It’s impossible to keep bilges entirely dry (between rain, spills, and other things, a bit of water always gets in somewhere), but a pump out every day is well above normal. We tasted the water and discovered it was fresh (ruling out a seawater leak), and after monitoring during a period with no rain determined it must be the freshwater system and not an external source. Further testing revealed the source must be after the water pump – somewhere in the part of the system that is pressurised. Hence the leaky tap was a clear suspect.

We’d actually already identified this tap as needing replacement, because the hoses were rusted beyond saving and we wanted to change the tap to a version that could function both as a normal sink tap and also as a pull out shower. So we already had a full replacement kit ready to go. We’d thought that might be a future project, but in the interest of fixing the leak this got bumped up the queue. Replacing this tap taught us many things. 1. Contortionism is a prerequisite for being able to adequately fix things like boat taps. The fittings are so buried, with such bad access, that they can only been reached by forming oneself into the oddest and most uncomfortable of shapes. 2. We need more specialist tools. After several hours of pain attempting to find a way to fit a wrench to the nut holding the last piece of the old tap on, Alec consulted our friend Tomo (who you met above). Tomo presented him with this glorious set of pipe keys, which allow you to create effectively the world’s longest socket wrench to reach nuts in unpleasant places. It took all of a minute for this lovely tool to best the tap and the old thing was free! We now have a beautiful, new, unleaky tap in that bathroom. However, it turns out this was not the (main) source of the leak. In fact, water continues to accumulate in the bilge at about the same rate as before the tap replacement. Oh well. At least we have a lovely new tap! The leak lives to fight another day…

Despite all the stress this week, you know what? Somehow, when we sailed out of Split, all the issues and stresses became so much smaller. Suddenly the part we were doing everything for became real – the sailing, the adventure, the sunshine, the chilling… it was a massive release and relief to just GO.

So, after chivvying our welder along in the morning, spending four hours charming the customs people, and then another five hours motoring (no wind, sadly) we finally reached Vis. It is Croatia’s most westerly island (halfway to Italy from the mainland), and a beautiful little place. It was actually only opened up to tourism in the early 1990s, having been an important military outpost during WWII and the years after. And it has largely remained a fairly quiet and pristine place. We made it in just as the light was fading for the day, moored on the town key, and checked in with the authorities. This done, we were truly and finally FREE – free to enjoy our time in Croatia and go where we please. To celebrate, we found the one and only restaurant that was open, gorged on pizza, and returned to Serenity happy and full to pass out. It was perhaps the best night’s sleep I have ever had!