Tuesday, April 23, 2013

ENVOY LAUNCHED WITHOUT A HITCH

Envoy is currently berthed at Lefkas Marina, Ionian Sea, Greece.
Envoy went into the water without a hitch on a beautiful still and sunny spring day last Thursday.
Launching is quite a procedure. The travelift arrives (always at a different time to that booked), and we have to get off the boat and remove the ladder while the marinaras position the heavy-duty synthetic lifting straps. Although we are nervous, these guys have done this hundreds of times before, and have no qualms about walking under boats while they are suspended from the straps. With its diesel engine roaring and belching exhaust smoke the travelift slowly trundles to the dock and gently lowers Envoy into the water. We need about ten minutes to check for any seawater leaks before the straps are removed. Aboard Envoy this involves checking eleven different internal areas, but the marinaras are relaxed (“don’t worry, take your time my friend”) and enjoy a smoke in the sun while they wait.
We give the all-clear and turn the engine’s start key. Last shut down six months, ago the trusty Lugger roars into life within a second. We back out of the launching dock as the marinaras fend us away from its rough concrete sides, and head to our berth.
So far everything is working well, the only issue was a leaking seawater strainer downstream from the generator’s seacock. While we were home in New Zealand the engineers from Sailand replaced the very heavy-duty Edson manual bilge pump hose, as it was cracking. This hose runs very close to the clear plastic section of the strainer, and the strainer probably got damaged as they wrestled the old hose out. A replacement from Athens and been installed.
With the generator running we were able to re-commission the water maker (the high electrical power requirement of the water maker means that we can only run it using the generator). Today I flushed out the winter “pickling” chemicals from the water maker, changed the two fresh water filters, cleaned the heavy-duty seawater filter, and the water maker started producing quality water within a few minutes.
Somebody up there does love me after all!
In a country where bulk potable water is not available, and you can only drink bottled water, you can’t imagine how great it feels to be able to produce your own drinking water.
Because the leaking diesel tank has not been fixed we needed to put ballast into it to maintain Envoy’s lateral trim. Previously we used ten litre bottles of water, but we can’t really get enough weight into the tank with water, so we’re now using old anchor chain. We needed about 500kg in total, which is obviously difficult to handle and load in one length, so we cut it up into approx 20 kg sections packed into plastic bags to avoid rust from the old chain spreading to our tank. Anchor chain makes great ballast because it settles into the available space within a tank.
Now we’ve only got a few jobs to complete before we can start cruising, and plan to leave Thursday.

During the weekend we had a huge surprise to see a Nordhavn 47 come into Lefkas Marina and moor just a few metres from us. This superb vessel, called C’mon Girl, is owned by Canadians Guy and Lou Goodwin. We had a great night out with Guy and Lou, who have cruised from Italy heading to Marmaris, Turkey, and we shared a rental car on Sunday to explore the interior of Lefkas Island.

For all you non-technical readers of the blog – hopefully our work stops, fun starts and the next posting will be more interesting with plenty of pics.



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