Underway to Tanger




Having night watch. It’s after midnight

It’s May 20 0340h UTC and I am writing a blog text. I wonder, being tired, how much this helps my grammar – let’s see 🙂

May 19, around noon we left our Marina berth for the fuel dock. We needed 380 liters of diesel to fill the tanks.

Docking off the fuel dock

The whole morning we prepared the boat for the trip. Getting LUNARA seaworthy is always more work then we think. The prior day, being out of the boatyard and back in the water, was filled with all the tasks you cannot do when out of the water. Testing the generator, adjusting idle rpm of the diesel engines, watermaker maintenance and washing the dirt and dust of the boat-yard off and many other chores. We maintain todo lists to keep up with all the stuff.

Cartagena industrial port

Around 14:30 we motored out of the harbor and set sails soon. With decent wind we sailed southwest with 6 knots. Between 1700h and 1800h UTC the wind died and we had to motor. On long distances we go into fuel saver mode which is running only one diesel at 1850 rpm. That’s typically good for 6 knots. Not today as we are heading into a short wave “thshhhh bang” every 6 seconds. We barely make 5 knots.

Leaving Cartagena

Late afternoon we had a wonderful first. A pod of pilot whales visited us. Families with kids so to speak. They swam under the boat and appear a more shy species then dolphins – not so easy to photograph as Flipper was. (We think they were Pilot whales. If anyone knows better please let us know in the comment section)

Pilot Whales (?)
On our stern so close you could theoretically touch them
Swimming right under the bow

Little duties continue while underway. We changed from our winter storm damaged flag to the official summer flag:

Should have changed earlier
Looks so much better
Weather forecast for the trip looks reasonably good. Sadly, the wind along our course will not be there anymore when we arrive.

It’s 0412h UTC now and the sky begins to brighten in the East from the soon rising sun.

I have to pay attention to other things now. I am logging out.

Bye, bye

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Epoxy, Rosé and why we still are in port.Epoxy, Rosé and why we still are in port.

Our Nautitech cat is a construction site – still and again. Our stay in Port Camargue for repairs in early September was planned. We needed some electrical work from last year finalized by a marine installer from La Rochelle and needed Nautitech to replace, on warranty, the three top salon windows which are raining through – among other open warranty items.

Not much happened in Port Camargue, except that we discovered new problems like osmosis on the coach roof where once the solar panels were. The issue is now to be settled between two insurances which takes time.

Today is October 31st, thus 2 month later and we are in La Grande Motte, a port nearby, where we are allowed to do fiberglas repairs. Repairs which did not happen so far (not the fault of the fiberglas expert).

The electricians came every two weeks for two or three days and even so some work had been done, a lot of work is left. As of today we miss two alternators on our engines, our generator is still in serious trouble and should be exchanged. And, there are more items on the electrical todo list. On the electronics side we have issues like the B&G instruments disagreeing between each other on what the actually depth is by 1 meter. The expert of the installer company could not fix it and declared it a software bug by B&G. He setup a partial workaround to the problem but the full functionality is not achieved. B&G’s technical support disagrees with the label of a software bug. I am working with B&G to resolve the issue.

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Electronics which work flawlessly. Thanks Carrefour!

Those are the moments where a glass of Rose becomes a crucial element of our life’s philosophy!

What happened to our solar panels?

We posted about the subject earlier and here is a bit more. One solar panel started to smolder/burn for unknown reasons in August where the connectors of the panel are located and burned a hole in the deck. The problem was discovered at an early stage thanks to an alert guest crew member (thanks B-Hoernchen!).

When we removed the panel from the roof we found solid osmosis under this panel and decided to inspect the other solar panels. We had Osmosis under nearly all panels. Since then, we had many experts onboard, as this is a rare occurrence on a one year old boat. They came to agree that water must have been trapped under the panels during the installation and together with the higher temperatures under the solar panels the moisture permeated through the gelcoat. Our flex solar panels were installed with Sikaflex on the perimeter which sealed the moisture permanently between deck and panel.

The bad news for us is that we entirely missed our weather window to sail in decent weather to Cyprus. During the winter, Cyprus has a very pleasant weather. Right now the temperatures are in the high 20s Celsius, while here we have 8C and rain. Today it’s warmer but raining like hell with gale force winds. We were told that this weather will go on until spring – only colder 🙁

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Hmmm! Time for some good food.

 

Last year we waited for a long time to get repairs done in La Rochelle. We dread to be a long time in port again and wait and beg and wait and beg until, like last year, we feel it necessary to employ a legal counsel. And yes, the windows still leak.

What can we do! Well, we go wine hunting or ‘degustation’ as it’s elegantly called in french, with our boat’s resident sommelier Remy.

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