One of the objectives of having Patreon guests on board A B Sea is to let them experience sailing and everything that's involved in the process of bringing the sails out and putting them away. The one magical ingredient you need for that is some wind, but after arriving at our first night's anchorage at Kekova in Turkey and waking up to a beautiful sunrise it was quite clear that wind was one of the things that would be lacking that day.
Our Patreon guest Michel, who is a certified RYA Day Skipper, suggested that we do some anchoring practice instead. After bacon and eggs for breakfast we motored around to the inner bay of Kekova near to the town and harbour of Üçağız and found that we had the huge western part of the bay all to ourselves.
We started off with Michel and Aannsha at the pointy end and did a couple of run throughs of dropping and bringing up the anchor. Then Michel came back to the helm and we ran through dropping the anchor, letting out the correct amount of chain, digging the anchor in and making sure it held fast.
Michel does have his own boat on a lake in Germany so he has experience of anchoring but he very much enjoyed doing it on a bigger boat and using chain instead of rope rode. Next we let Michel motor us over to our second night's anchorage and get A B Sea settled in for the night.
Turbo woes
The feedback we received from our video #142 certainly opened up a can of worms. In one camp many marine engineers with decades of experience warned us that our simple fix of bypassing the turbo was going to cause unseen damage to our engine which would eventually lead to its death. In the other camp many old salts told us that what we'd done was perfectly okay and we should carry on as normal.
I did a lot of thinking, passed back and forth many emails with a few people and got deeper into the reasoning of the marine engineers. That led to me coming to the conclusion that the turbo needed replacing. But before that could happen we needed to do something else to the engine.
When the turbo imploded it created the possibility that small metal fragments could have been ingested into the engine. I was advised that the best course of action was to remove the intake and exhaust manifolds and the cylinder head and inspect for and remove any metal fragments, which if they were there would cause irreparable damage to the engine.
Thankfully I won't have to tackle that job on my own as our buddy Kev has offered to help and the bonus is that many years ago he used to build racing engines for cars as a hobby. Before we can start that job we are waiting for the new gaskets to arrive from Istanbul and then we'll begin our search for a reconditioned turbo. Life is never dull when you own a boat.
Revamp the site
While all that was going on Aannsha and our son Luke have had a busy few weeks revamping the A B Sea website to make it more streamlined and to incorporate an online shop to sell our A B Sea merchandise, which Aannsha has also been researching, designing and promoting.
You can check out what's on offer by clicking this link.
I've just noticed that this blog is about half the length of my usual blogs but that doesn't mean that there's not a lot going on, the pace of life even at the marina is quite hectic as you'll see in the next few upcoming videos. Until then stay safe wherever you are and whatever you're doing.
To watch the video that accompanies this blog click here.
Comments