Let’s hope 2023 is better than last year!   Wednesday, 04/01/2023

While things might have been fine wherever you are, most will probably agree that 2022 was not a great year for the world. The return of inflation is unwelcome, while the less said about Russia and its president the better. The UK is presently in the throes of multiple strikes, while South Africans are struggling with frequent electricity outages – so called “load shedding”.

Here everything has been pretty peaceful. With the exception of last night. I was sitting outside in the cockpit in my very comfortable reclining chair at about 11:45pm, finishing a rum and ginger ale, when I heard a Whumpf – the sort of noise you get if you ignite a bowl of petrol. I looked to starboard and there were flames coming up from the catamaran tied up 15 metres away! I jumped up, and saw that a guy who works in the marina was already there, with a fire extinguisher. I dived below for a bucket and headed over – but he had already put the fire out. Lots of black smoke, but apparently no serious damage.

I was surprised at the time that no one was there, because I was sure that I’d seen a man on board. Today I saw him – it turns out he was there, but asleep down below and didn’t hear a thing! The source of the fire was his shore power connector – which he proudly showed me was a lump of molten black plastic! He’s an American – nice guy, but I was surprised with how casual he was about the whole thing. I reckon he must be an engineer or similar, because he was a lot more interested in the science of the matter than in the fact that his boat could have gone up in flames!

The problem is with the power supply here. Apparently the voltage regularly falters, which means that the current compensates by spiking in order to maintain the wattage being drawn. A sharp rise in current had therefore fried his power connector, which simply burst into flames. He was plotting possible ways of avoiding the problem… I did tactfully suggest to him that he was damn lucky that there were two people around who saw the fire break out – otherwise he could easily have been forced to get out through an escape hatch below into the water because the top of his boat was on fire! He agreed, but was amazingly blasé about it.

Which really endeared him to me! Now the reality is that the majority of sailors are – in my opinion – too cautious/worried/paranoid about their boats! Sometimes really excessively so. But this guy was the exact opposite – breezily unconcerned! He did thank me for being on the scene, so in other words he sort of recognised that it was a dangerous situation, but he remained very fascinated by the whole mechanics of the thing – rather than the fact that he could have lost his boat, and given his propensity for heavy sleep, his life! 

So, I don’t consider myself over-cautious or much of a worrier about the boat, but I do think that a fire – flames about a foot and a half high – on a boat is a deadly serious matter. Fortunately, the vagaries of the shore power here don’t concern me. I live entirely off solar power – my three 350 watt panels easily produce five times the power I need to run the fridge all day and lights at night. (Needless to say, solar panels work really well in the tropics – the other day it was cloudy, yet my batteries had completely recharged by 9am, not bad when sunrise is just after 6:30). The American told me he needs shore power to run his air conditioner because he works from his boat. I must admit I have a negative view of air conditioning – the problem is that if you use it, you need it, because your body doesn’t adapt to the prevailing temperature. Actually I find it very bearable here – partly because I came from Cartagena where it’s much hotter, but also because there’s usually a very good breeze, coming in from the sea. Simply open a couple of hatches and you have a nice wind coming through the boat which means that you aren’t sitting sweating (although admittedly in the middle of the day I’m not wearing a shirt). And evenings are lovely! Having returned from the beach just after 6pm, I’m sitting outside now and it’s pleasantly cool… When I look up I’m looking at the guy’s boat and wondering whether it’s going to burst into flames again! Haha.

Apart from that bit of pyrotechnics, it’s been a quiet new year in the marina. I had the German guy who runs the small sail shop on the boat this morning, looking at my torn sail bag. I told him I need new sails – the mainsail in particular is very stretched. Instead of having a modest curve to it, it’s rounded when up. The German said he thought the material of the sail looked good, and he might be able to do something to fix the stretchedness, so a local guy who he introduced me to is going to come round tomorrow to help me take the sails down and get them into the workshop. It’s worth a try, given that new sails will no doubt cost several thousand (dollars, pounds or euros!).

There’s no surprise that the sails are now in poor shape. They were new in 2017 and were in “as new” condition when I bought Manuka in 2020. The problem is that new sails would normally last 10 years, but that’s with “normal” use – the average boat sails 5 hours a day for 30 days a year: so that’s 150 hours a year. Just my trip from the UK to Antigua last year was 900 hours! I sailed 5,000 nautical miles in 2021 and another 2,285 in the Caribbean last year – a total of 7,300 miles. At an average 5 knots, that’s almost 1,500 hours – effectively 10 years’ “normal” use. Not to mention the effect of tropical sun – way more damaging to everything than the milder sun you get 50-60 degrees north in Europe! You see it very clearly with t-shirts – if you wear one often for a few weeks, first the colour drains out of it and then the material goes thin and it suddenly tears as you pull it over your head…