I wish all boat problems were this straightforward.

The raw water intake problem was a blockage. I opened the strainer (empty the lazarette of sundry stuff, climb in, close the seacock, unscrew strainer, all while sweating a lot in the cramped, hot quarters) this morning and found…a box fish! Yup, the poor little guy got too close to the intake and got sucked in. That must have been the little “burp” I swear I heard the engine make right before the cooling water stopped coming out of the exhaust. There are a bunch of them swimming around the dock, so we’ll have to keep our guard up. This is why you never leave the boat with the engine running. Five minutes or less and the engine would have been cooked if I hadn’t heard the “dry” exhaust sound and shut down the engine!

A box fish by the way looks like a box with a tail on it. Unlikely looking thing.

Anyway, on with the waiting. I think we’re going to send Ann up the mast later this morning to have a look at the rig. We have the time and she’s getting bored, so why not?

Monday, no, Tuesday. No, no, wait, Wednesday is going to perfect. ARRGGHH!

The South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ) has moved down on top of Fiji which means the weather forecasting is all but out the door. One day, it looks like there’s going to be a tropical depression (no Bueno), the next day looks good to go, then the next shows torrential rain and headwinds.

Bottom line: I don’t want to head out on an over 1200 mile voyage with such uncertainty. Weather is enough of a crap shoot without the added uncertainty of the SPCZ. So we sit…and wait. This is all exacerbated by the fact that there are probably a dozen other boats around here all ready to head back and literally everyone has an opinion and it’s usually; “Ah, you should have left yesterday”. Well my response; “I’ll leave when I think it’s safe and we’ll have a good ride. YOU can leave when you want”.

The next possible window by my calculation looks to be Monday. Not to jinx it, but this one looks pretty decent, so we’re going to plan for it.

In the mean time Murphy has come aboard. We were running the engine today to charge the batteries a bit given the paucity of sun to power the solar panels, and I heard a gurgle, burp and the raw water exhaust quit flowing. This is the main cooling system for the engine, so I shut the engine down immediately. It was after my shower around 5PM, so I’m not going to start digging around until tomorrow, but suffice to say, this is a major issue. It may be simple like a plastic bag sucked into the intake, or something in the strainer. Or, it it might be a bigger deal like a broken impeller. I replaced the impeller in NZ in March, so if it’s that it’s likely due to the pumice fields we have occasionally seen. There are active volcanos in these waters and you run through floating pumice from time to time. It’s possible for the bits of abrasive pumice to get through the strainer and into the raw water system and wear down the impeller prematurely (they are supposed to last at least 500 engine hours).

Oh well. At least we won’t be bored sitting here waiting.