It was a typical beautiful Asian morning, with a huge fire ball sun rise, with roosters crowing as the pleasant smell of burning coconut husk permeated the humid air as I sipped my coffee.
I was about to make an embarrassing call to the marina to ask them to tow us in so we could pick up a mooring ball. It was the first time in my life that I had to be towed, but shit happens.
Shortly after, 5 guys arrived in a dinghy and towed us the short distance back to the marina. We were very lucky; it could have been a lot worse. Once securely moored to the swing mooring, Luke went ashore for breakfast and a look around while I started sorting out the engine problems.
The problem was severe corrosion on the raw water pump and alternator V-belt pullies. I saw this at Marina Del Ray and it didn’t appear to be a real concern when I was running the engines before leaving, and I had assumed it to be only superficial surface rust and would most likely wear off pretty fast once we were underway.
Unfortunately, it was quite severe on both the engine pulley and the raw water pump pullies, and both were extremely hard to get to in the very confined space in the engine rooms.
I had brought two spare belts for both the alternators and the raw water pumps with me and wasn’t too concerned, but after realising I had already used one of each on the way up, I need to get some spares for the long trip home.
After replacing one of the raw water pump belts, I went into shore to track down Peter, the marina manager to ask if he could order me some new belts.
I finally caught up with Peter and he was more than happy to help out. He placed an order with one of his suppliers and they would arrive some time tomorrow. As it was such a difficult and shitty job trying to reach into such an awkward place to replace these belts, I thought I’d try and locate a mechanic to perform the work for me at hopefully a reasonable rate.
If I could locate a mechanic, I’d get him to first clean the rust off all the pullies before installing four new V-belts, and also get him to perform an oil change on both engines that I had intended to do myself when I had some free time on the journey back to Darwin.
Luck was on our side and we located a Balinese diesel mechanic who was available tomorrow, so it was all coming together and hopefully we could be on our way again Tuesday morning.
Medana Bay Marina hadn’t changed since I was there two years ago before the pandemic, but there were quite a few yachts still sitting up on the hard stand, some were in a pretty sorry state and there were a few owners working on then who we socialized with.
Being stuck here also allowed us to stock up on a few last-minute items now we had easy access to shops and the marina restaurant was handy for two lazy cooks. It also allowed me to get more boats jobs done in a relaxed atmosphere rather than while we were underway.
When the sun went down, lots of small fishing canoes came
out all with a petrol generator running and a huge bright light on the bow,
slowly moving in big circles around us searching for squid and schools of white
bait. None of them appeared to be catching anything and it was the most unsustainable
method of fishing I have seen so far in Indonesia.
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