WHANGAREI FALLS, A photo of the boat this week’d just be too depressing.

…Toolkits!
23rd January: I and Lesley are tired stiff and sore from spending too long grovelling in Moon Rebel’s bilges, indeed Lesley’s taken herself off to bed for the afternoon. So what’s been going well? My Mum’s back out of hospital and by the sound of things recovering well. We’re beginning to get organised as to who/where when we can catch up with folks whilst we’re back in the UK and so far not too many people are away/unavailable whilst we’re home, the big exception being Tom off ‘Alba Voyager’ who was likely to be in the UK rather than down on the Algarve until the end of February, but sadly succumbed to a heart attack at New Year.
Most of the boat jobs have been going well and after the excellent job that Ronnie did on our sprayhood, we took our sail cover down to his workshop and that too has been brilliantly refurbished at an unbelievably low price. The Lewmar windlass has been reinstalled and the storage cupboards around it refurbished and sealed, so hopefully no more soggy cornflakes when lifting the anchor in heavy seas; the other one we got from Adam’s been stowed away for use the next time our Lewmar dies – I still need to pay him for that, I wish I knew where he lived or had some contact details.
After Burnley’s desperate run of form over Christmas we’ve now beaten Leicester City and Manchester United (At Old Trafford, apparently the first time since 1962!) in quick succession and England are looking like winning the Test Series in South Africa, so why am I tired and fed-up? Because of the bloody Greeks!
Immediately prior to our buying Moon Rebel in 2011 it’d spent the preceding three years being restored/updated/overhauled in the Ionian, not a DIY job by the previous owners, but as the sales literature proudly proclaiming ‘Moon Rebel has been ‘Professionally Maintained’. This led to our adopting a regular adjective aboard of ‘It’s another Greek Job’, this being something that looked – indeed generally was – on the surface really good, but which when you looked a little deeper had been undermined by some foolish shortcut to save a few hours or €uros. Particularly memorable examples were discovering that the stanchions for the guard wires were installed using stainless steel bolts, but only plated nuts to secure them – fortunately in light winds/flat seas and rather than a heavy duty (think battery leads) cable to supply power to the anchor windlass, they instead used a length of domestic house wiring cable, with all three cores twisted together. Of late we thought that such surprises were behind us, let’s be honest, if a job’s lasted eight years and 30,000+ miles without attention, it shouldn’t be criticised.
However, a couple of weeks ago we set to work on the water and diesel tanks, both of which were suffering from ‘pinhole leaks’; they’re both stainless steel, made and fitted in 2010, so an 8 or 9 year lifespan is disappointing, but could’ve been worse. The water tank began leaking enroute from Ecuador to the French Polynesia – perhaps losing a couple of litres per day – but we hauled the tank out in the Marquesa Islands and at least managed to slow the leaks down; we didn’t get the tank properly dry, nor had we got enough epoxy putty to repair it properly and we couldn’t get any more. Actually, we did find some eventually, but getting the tank out was such a ball-ache of a job and perhaps more importantly, the tank needed to be empty to do the job and with water replenishment spots being scarce and invariably requiring it to be hauled out in the dinghy by jerry can in the Marquesas, we were loath to run it down. With the leak reduced to < 1 litre a day and a deep bilge, we left it until now.
The diesel tank leak began just before we left Fiji and that leak’s even more ‘minor’, perhaps ¼ litre/day? But being diesel rather than water, it makes its presence felt, there’s always a scent of it within the boat and a guilty feeling whenever we pump it out into the sea and as the removal route for the diesel tank is through the space which the water tank occupies, then doing them together makes sense. With New Year over we prevaricated as long as I reasonably could – it was never going to be fun and Lesley gets antsy whenever the boats ‘disrupted’ – including drying time for the epoxy, we’d have the table/floor out for several days – we finally set to work. The floor table and water tank removal were actually easier than I remember from the Marquesas (perhaps being in a well sheltered marina, rather than a rolling anchorage?) and in a couple of hours we had the tank drained, out and secured on deck; no point in doing the repairs just yet as the diesel tank comes out second/back in first, so we moved straight onto that one expecting to have that on deck by lunchtime too.
We took off the inspection hatch to drain the tank and give us somewhere to get a decent grip on it, undid the four retaining screws and attempted to lift/pull it out of the void beneath the engine, it wouldn’t move even a millimetre? After struggling all afternoon I got a friend in to help (Lesley ran for cover!) and we hooked a timber baulk inside to the tank and a rope from there up through the companionway to the mainsheet on the underside of the boom, fastened the main halyard and topping-lift close to the lift point, taking the load to the masthead, then when hand-hauling on the mainsheet still didn’t shift it, we took it to a genoa sheet winch and began to crank. We managed lots of creaking & groaning, a noticeable bend in the mast (it looked like a racing catamaran!) and a slack backstay, but still not a millimetre of movement in the tank? Time for beer and some more thought.
As a DIY bodger I would’ve sat that tank on some support framework and whilst ordering a tank as close as possible to the bilge’s size/profile, would still to have allowed a few millimetres of clearance to allow the free circulation of air (you’d get corrosion leading to pinhole leaks otherwise!) and then secure it with tapered timber battens/wedges (the sort of thing you could easily tap/pull out for subsequent removal) But this one’s a Premier League ‘Greek Job’ done by highly skilled professionals: Rather than bothering with a support frame on the floor of the bilge, they’ve slid the tank into place and just tapped into position, a fixing bracket secures the front end, whilst the back was no doubt a ‘light’ interference- fit against the fibreglass hull; it probably looked quite neat and tidy at the time. But once you’ve added a 100kg of diesel to the tank and spent ten years bouncing it around in heavy seas, the tank’s slowly worked its way further down into the bilge – that also perhaps explains why the tank’s ‘low-point’ is at the back of the tank, rather than at the front, underneath the access hatch where accumulated water/sludge could be more easily cleaned out from?
The front face of the tank (about 50cm high) is vertical and a tight fit against the adjacent vertical bilge face too, so our hauling at the front end was never going to achieve anything other than to press the tank’s front bottom edge tighter into the bilge face, it needed lifting from the back, a pity that’s located directly under the engine and engine box, the former (unsurprisingly) being an expensive thing to remove/refit and the latter being a structural element of the boat, an angle grinder will get it out in half an hour, but it’d take a skilled fibreglass man about three days to rebuild it, so even more expensive and it would probably would still never be quite right again. We walked away from the job for a few days before having the next ‘Eureka Moment’: Going through the minor everyday exercise of removing the boat’s exhaust system and gearbox would allow access to a 4” diameter hole through the engine box that just about lines up with the back edge of the tank. Follow that up by stripping out most of the boat’s diesel supply and freshwater systems, so someone very tall and very slim (clearly not me) could slither under the engine far enough to reach a little further and drill a hole into the back edge of the tank, get a heavy steel hook connected into it, then we can get some pull at the right end of the tank – it can’t fail!.
I did the dismantling, whilst Patrick of Blue Zulu was suckered employed to do the drilling and hooking, once connected up to the mainsheet, boom/mast and genoa winch, the pull direction looked great, we were surely onto a winner? More creaking, groaning and bending masts/sagging rigging came to an end with a quite spectacular Bang; no doubt the sound of the tank breaking free and slamming into the underside of the engine box? Sadly not, it was the rope that broke; to be fair I had used an old 8mm rope, not least because I wanted something less expensive to be what broke rather than the mast or rigging. Patrick gathered his tools and disappeared soon after and I suspect that I might find him ‘too busy’ to get involved further? If I was in his shoes I certainly wouldn’t come back for another round.
So, the diesel tank’s being ignored again for a while and we’ve advanced our haul out date from the 13th to the 5th of February, to give us an extra week to try again once we’re ashore: There’s a theory that with water pressure removed from the outside and the boat sat ashore taking all the weight on the keel, this might ‘spring’ the hull outward just enough to release the tank. As an addition, if we were to fill the bilge with water, that’d apply additional upward pressure against the floor of the tank and provide some lubrication between the tank walls and the fibreglass hull too. It’s success sounds so feasible that we’ve christened it the ‘Straw-Clutching Plan’, I’ll let you know how we get on in the next Blog, at the moment I need to get on with reinstalling the gearbox, exhaust and fuel systems to allow us to motor the mile or so to the boatyard, where I can take them all out again. There’s no point reassembling the freshwater system as the water tank’s still sat on deck anyway; only a further three-week’s of disruption to the galley and saloon, I’m sure Lesley’ll see the funny side of it eventually.
24th January: Three and a half hours to connect the bottom end of the exhaust hose, I’d forgotten all about the joys of doing that job. Perhaps it was the same highly skilled professional who fitted the diesel tank that thought suspending the Vetus water-lock box underneath the engine tray was a good idea? You couldn’t remove it without hauling the boat! Ferkin Greeks!