Sisu has been sleeping soundly and now we’re back at Curacao Marine to wake her up. We made the wise move this time to book a one room apartment at Willemstad Resort for a couple of weeks whilst we adjusted to the heat and carried out most of the prep, cleaning, fixing etc. This meant we could leave the interior of Sisu in a total shambles and walk away till the following morning to start work again, refreshed from a good nights sleep in an air conditioned room with it’s own bathroom, kitchen, and best of all a fridge with cold beers!
The yard is packed full of boats and catamarans, snugly slotted alongside each other. Many are group 1 from the Rally getting ready to leave for Spanish Water which is a large lagoon 10 miles south of Willemstadt a very narrow and winding entrance leads into the lagoon which is able to accommodate hundreds of boats. In Curacao Marine the sound of drilling, sanding, creak of feet on ladders as folks climb up and down to their boats, hulls being scraped in readiness for antifouling, and the almost constant background rumble of the huge tractor and lifting gear as more boats are found a space somewhere and now and then a boat being taken to the slip to gently be eased into the water, the eagerly awaited splash day! We are a little land locked community, and we share tales of jobs, share tools, and help if asked. The Marina workmen are cheerful and we all work alongside each other, focussed on time scales and deadlines.
We have some copper coat touching up to do. We wear paper overalls and masks, inhaling copper coat dust is dangerous, the suits immediately cling to us as we sand the areas where more copper coat is needed. We work quickly, the heat dries the copper coat mix as fast as we are rolling it on! Terry changes the impellor in the engine, and the whole engine is checked over, it’s so incredibly hot, and he is soon lying in a pool of sweat and oil on the floor of the cabin as he works on the engine. Six months of standing in the secure yard during hurricane season has added an unexpected job to our long list. The fore cabin is lined with cream vinyl. The foam backing which is glued to the hull hasn’t coped with the relentless heat of the sun on the hull. My side has peeled off! With a big sweaty sigh, we decide to pull the whole lot off, literally stripping our bedroom walls. Luckily we have hired a car from where we are staying, so after a trip to Kooyman, the Dutch equivalent of B & Q, we come back with sheets of plywood, and Terry now sweats in the fore cabin, measuring and sawing panels to make our bedroom walls, which I will paint white. We’re pleased with the final result! Pity it’s too hot to actually sleep in there just now……
Our good friends Neil and Helen McCubbin, of Milvina are here, they’re with group 1, after a day’s work we share beers and catch up with each other. We begin to meet new folks from both groups, soon we will split, but will meet up again probably in Columbia.
The rain in the early days of our work has been torrential, stopping the pace of exterior jobs so we try to work inside the boat as thunder loudly rumbles above us, the air heavily charged with electricity and despondency as time scales disintegrate like sand paper in the large, deep pools of rainwater around our hulls.
The sun comes out again, and the yard dries out, work recommences. Another good friend Mike Brooks arrives, so good to see him! He’s a lot of work to do on his boat Exulans and soon he and Terry are comparing ideas and borrowing each others gear. Getting our boat ready is a game of snakes and ladders. We had planned to repaint the engine mounts, but we find the engine mounts have parted and need replacing, we’ve thrown a one, and slid down a snake. The boat budget is hit as we buy two new mounts! Another job allocated to me is scraping old paint off the drive shaft joints for the propeller shaft, a job which took two days, squatting on a wooden block, tucked under our hull out of the sun, I patiently scraped then painted the parts. Strangely satisfying. Whilst Terry’s doing the engineering side of our job list, I take care of the tarting up list, masking off and repainting anti slip panels in the cockpit, scrubbing and re oiling the teak toe rails, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. A big job was repainting the blue water line, masking off two lines all the way along the hull, tricky as I have to work with Sisu’s curves, hers are generous, mine are disappearing as we dig into our work load in 30 degrees! Then I carefully roller between the masked off lines, turquoise blue, my favourite, she looks so good afterwards!
We do find time to party though, Suzanne and Curacao Marine have laid on a Suzy Too Rally Welcome Party! We had a great night, free beer, good food and a lively buzz as many on the Rally met each other for the first time.
I managed to escape the job list for an afternoon watching Group 1 do a parade of sail around the Willemstad harbour area, a handsome sight with all the boats decked out in bunting, glad we packed lots of Manx flag bunting for when it’s our time to parade somewhere, we’ll be easy to spot!
Finally, splash day! We had completed all the hull and propellor work, now it was time to hoist Terry up the mast and put Sisu’s sails on. We would be sleeping on board now too and joining the pontoon community! We were asked to tie up alongside a pontoon in a tight corner, next to a boat. Sisu doesn’t like reversing, and, with the wind working against us, and a sharp angle to turn, with the help of Neil in his dinghy, nudging us, and plenty of available line handlers from the other boats, after a couple of attempts and lots of encouragement from the pontoon, we managed to coax her in, like backing a very spirited and reluctant horse into a trailer!
We decide to sleep in the main cabin, until we’re anchored at Spanish Water where the wind will blow through our boat, it’s just too hot on the pontoons, even with the big fan and two little ones whirring away all night. There’s mozzies here too, at night we slather ourselves in mozzy repellant in an attempt to stop the buggers biting us. We look forward to setting sail in the near future!
Each day, Sisu looks more like a boat, the sprayhood goes on, sails on, the outboard is brought out from the heads and secured on the stern, I clean inside, tidy up, then we do another mucky job and the whole interior is a shambles once more, I’m philosophical now, it’s a way of life, even when on the anchor and we have to do some maintenance!
Group 1 boats are leaving plus some that are not on the Rally, the pontoon and yard are emptying, the air is quieter. Soon it’s our turn.
We’ve been getting to know folks well here, it’s always a wrench to go, but we may well meet up somewhere along the way, we swap contact cards with our new friends and have a bit of party in the evening before we leave.
27 Nov. Jutta and Leo, Schoss Ort, from Austria, also in Group 2 are leaving at the same time as us. With lots of waving and goodbyes from the pontoon, Schloss Ort casts off, and then we do. We radio Fort Nassau bridge control. This is the famous swinging bridge made up on many small floating pontoons. As there will be two boats wishing to pass through to the open sea, there’s a good chance the bridge will open with little delay. However…. We motor out into the wide canal, the wind has picked up and there’s the shriek of our hi temperature alarm! Oh no! We can’t carry on, we may seriously damage the engine. What a blow. We have no option but to switch off the engine, pull out a little headsail and sail back to the marina. We have to tack as the wind is driving us near the rocks at the side of the river. There’s no chance to settle in to handling our girl, or getting familiar with sheets and halyards, we have to act quickly, it’s amazing how quick a middle aged brain works when it has to! We radio Mark at the Marina, and tell him we have to come back in, on entering the pontoons, we pull in the head sail and turn the engine on, just enough to manoeuvre on to a pontoon, to have our lines taken by pretty much the same little group who waved us off only an hour ago! Not so much a shake down sail, as a shaken up sail!!!!
After a day spent finding what the problem could be, we think it was an airlock in the water inlet, Terry found a pipe that was slightly slack, potentially causing air to enter. Once tightened, he ran Sisu’s engine in gear, whilst tied against the pontoon at 1500 revs, effectively recreating her motion through the water, I hoped we wouldn’t take the pontoon with us ! No problems so we were ready to try again. Later we had a lovely evening with Betrand from France and Patricia from Brazil on s/v Mupi on their way to cross the Pacific. We set sail the following morning for Spanish Harbour, being waved off yet again and hoping that we would not be back in an hour !!
sisu journey 