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| Our only companion out here... |
Today was started off with a disaster, we had been motoring all night and had both fallen asleep (bad bad bad!) and awoke to a lot of smoke and the smell of burning rubber. We quickly turned the motor off, lifted the engine cover and found that 1) the 'fan' belt had broken so the alternator and waterpump were not going so the poor engine was bloody hot! 2) because it was so hot for some reason it spat all the engine oil out and was now sitting in the bilge (we though we may have cracked something on the engine but thankfully not), and 3) it had thrown all the coolant out (great there goes $45 worth of antifreeze/summer coolant) so we topped up the water, fitted a new belt and replaced oil and started it up to make sure its still running ok and to cool it down. All went well but the diesel was getting low, very low so decided to shut it off all together and try sail in the pathetic amount of wind we had. I removed the top inspection cover on the fuel tank and scooped out all remaining fuel which was about 15L at best so that plus the full jerry can was about 33L of diesel (only enough for maybe 6-8 hours motoring in good conditions so decided to save it for the last run into Wellington harbour and docking. We replumbed the fuel lines to the jerry can as it was having a hard time getting the last bit out of the main tank. The day was slow and the sails flopped around all day with only 5-8kn of wind which was swinging all over the show. Finally as evening came the wind started chaning and building and we had a pretty fast sail up to Cape Palliser. It was when we rounded the cape things were getting intersting....
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