THERE'S BITS EVERYWHERE!!!

We have onboard three men who speak Spanish but little English and three English people who speak little Spanish but all seems to be going well, I suspect due to the relationship that we have made with our main mechanic over the past couple of weeks. All parts are now present and correct and with any luck this will be my final blog entry for some time given that the engine and gearbox will run fine in the next few hours. The bad news is that we are now approximately three weeks behind the front of the fleet and we will be forced to miss out the Marquases and point at Tahiti instead to make up lost time and to meet the boss. It has been a big drama that at times seemed never ending and although moral has taken a bit of a battering at times everyone has stayed friends with no real falling outs. This of course has been aided by the sheer amount of cake that Bryony made of the many bananas that we had for the crossing but had ripened too soon. Onwards to Tahiti

Still here

It didn't go to plan. The engine is still in pieces, even more so. It transpires that the head has been leaking due to being warped. We didn't do a bad job in panama when replacing the head gasket but didn't have access to all the services we needed such as getting the head checked and skimmed before the canal transit. So the cylinder head is now on it's way to Guayaquil on the main land to get a skim. This has put us back another few days and time is now getting very short and I can't help but get the feeling that the general mood on board is slightly less jovial than usual. On the plus side we have time to get on with more daily tasks such as polishing and generally making things shiny and well functioning. Tosh and I went for a sneaky dive on the pretence of cleaning and inspecting the hull if the rangers asked what we were up to. The bottom of the boat gets a lot of growth very quickly being parked here. It was an interesting dive with a lot of swell trying to sweep us around, away and into the boat with my dive watch beeping as a warning I was coming up too quickly due to the amount of movement in the water. Whilst giving the hull a scrub we were followed by a lot of curious puffer fish that had a very easy meal on the algae that we were knocking off. We even had a white tip shark come by for a look.