English Harbour (2) Antigua

Views of Freeman Bay and Galleon Beach in English Harbour

The time in Antigua slid past remarkably fast and mostly to a fairly standard format: boat jobs and tasks during the day and social activity in the evening.  With internet access assured from our trip to St Johns, our next major task was working on re-calibrating our fuel tank gauge.  BV has 2 fuel tanks, one forward and one aft.  The aft tank contains both the feed to the engine and the fuel gauge.  The forward tank feeds into the aft tank via a cross-feed that can be closed off and has no gauge or supply direct to the engine.  We have previously always kept the tanks linked together but the disadvantage of this, as was highlighted to us on passage down to Antigua, is that the gauge effectively reads one level consistently over a large volume, whilst the forward tank feeds into the aft tank.  So, we decided to close the valve between the forward and aft tanks, fill the forward tank to full (which according to BV’s records is about 140litres) and then fill the aft tank whilst making a note of the gauge readings and the volume of fuel added.  Then, we will use the fuel from the aft tank until we reach an appropriately low level (say 50litres, at which point the tank is narrow and steeply sided and the gauge reads most accurately) and then open the cross-feed from the forward tank which will immediately provide a further 140litres and we will have a pretty accurate idea of the volume of fuel remaining at all times, but certainly from about 190litres down (about 60hrs engine running).

It was a long, time-consuming job.  We filled the tanks using the jerry cans we have on deck, running them back and forth to the fuel dock to refill them as required.  We could have moved BV to the fuel dock but that would have risked our losing our space in the anchorage.  Also, using the jerry cans to fill the tanks for this job is better for us as it results in less frothing of the fuel as it goes into the tanks so we get more accurate gauge readings.  It was a good 6-8 hours work to achieve but we now have a ‘new and improved’ fuel graph so we’ll see how it compares with our estimate of fuel used based on a nominal fuel usage per hour.  And at the end of it all, to celebrate our achievement, we had a lovely evening on board Zipporah with Doug and Mary Mann.

Not a bad place to carry out maintenance chores!

The next day’s task (Thursday 5 December) was to fix the steaming light which had failed part way down to Antigua.  I had hoped that it was just the bulb that had failed but, inevitably, the quick fix didn’t solve the problem.  Happily, the wiring to light was good and it turned out that it was the bulb holder itself that needed tweaking to make the contacts just that little bit better.  With that task complete, Nicky set to more sanding and varnishing, this time in the forward heads where a leaking porthole had resulted in damage to the varnish on the grabrails and where old age had resulted in some tired-looking trim.

After a couple of hours’ work, and suitably fed up with sanding and varnishing, she suggested we do a different type of cleaning and we took to the water to scrub over BV’s new Coppercoat.  It was all still looking remarkably new and coppery (we had expected the verdigris to be developing by this stage) and much to our satisfaction there was very little growth or slime on the hull at all.

Tot Club at the Hot Hot Hot Spot

We hosted Richard and Jane (Zwailer) at the Tot Club for the first time that evening and to our surprise met up with David and Roberta (Pleione) there.  It was a fun evening at the Club, and David and Roberta then invited us back to Pleione which ended with an excellent impromptu pasta dinner on board.   The conversation on Pleione that evening ranged far and wide but one of the topics that came up was the problem that David and Roberta were having with their HF radio.

Two of the 26 new teak plugs that I replaced,
 glued in and almost ready for sanding flush

So, the following day, after more varnishing for Nicky and after I had replaced far too many (26!!) teak plugs in our cockpit teak deck, we popped over to see them, armed with a useful book about HF/SSB radios and several lists of Caribbean HF radio nets and weather broadcasts.  It was not at all clear what the problem with their system was but our combined best guesses were a short in the aerial system and/or one or more poor connections.  David and Roberta spent several days checking the system through from top to toe and eventually they announced that they could at least hear the OCC Net, though their transmissions were still very weak.  Chasing down a fault like that is a nightmare, not helped by the fact that Pleione is made of aluminium, so the risk of stray currents and short circuits is far more than on, say, BV.  If they’re very lucky, the fault will come to light quickly but if they’re not, they could still be working on the problem for the rest of the season………

Dinner out in Falmouth at the Cap Horn with Stephen (left) and Katherine Paine (Anura) and their crew Mike (right) who was flying home the next day after their trans-Atlantic passage

We spent that evening with Stephen and Katherine Paine (Anura) who are friends from back home in Guernsey, and their crew for their trans-Atlantic passage, Mike.  Inevitably, we started off at the Tot Club which, on a Friday, always gathers at the Copper and Lumber which always feels a little bit special.  We kept the evening going with an excellent meal out at the Cap Horn restaurant, somewhere we had not eaten before but where we would happily go again.

English Harbour, Antigua