Mar 31 - What a crazy 24 hours...

We met Mathhi yesterday; what a delightful guy. He's our agent here in Gan for check-out and whatever, and he's been really great. His contact details: email masood@mnsmaldives.com; tel 960 7906609. Stuart and I dropped our laundry off with one of his guys to take care of, and then we went to the machine shop. This is where Stuart will get his propane bottle filled, and he also needed some work on a small motor. I had bought that Jabsco Water Puppy in, and when we stripped it down, it was irreparably damaged...who knows why. At any rate, we then arranged a diesel run, and also stopped at the fuel station, which happened to have a 12 volt pump whose specs just about matched the Jabsco! What were the odds? When we returned to our boats, things went downhill in a hurry. We had decided to move the boat a bit, as our stern was awfully near the reef behind us in a SW wind. This was about 1630 hours. The anchorage basin is small and there's not a lot of good areas to drop the hook and have swinging room. As the anchor went down, the windlass malfunctioned, putting tons of chain down, with the chain wrapping itself around the gypsy, pulling out the hawse plate, and just surprising the hell out of us before the breaker tripped and the unit shut down. Shit. Untangling that mess took a while, and it was too late to affect repairs. Besides, the head was plugged up, no doubt with the heavy sea moss which was all over the place. It took me hours to get into the seacock area, which is T'ed for the head intake, and still couldn't get the stuff out. Did I mention it was late and I was really sweaty? Hmmm. I got a few hours sleep, waking up when our anchor drag alarm went off...all was well in that department as we had set the alarm for a too short swinging radius and the boat had turned, but I thought to myself..."what can I do that won't wake Sue up?" Of course...continue on that darn head.... At any rate, I pulled a ton of moss out of the intake valve and intake line, took a little out of the discharge valve, replaced the joker valve, and replumbed everything. Eureka...that did the trick. Thank goodness. Time to tackle the autopilot issues. The new Simrad hasn't yet gotten the proper data feed from our GPS. I thought I had wired it correctly, but no. So, that was next and it's now rewired and things are looking good on the screen. Nothing like a sea trial to test things out. We've been getting intermittent SW squalls, with winds up to 28 knots recorded, along with rain and cloudy skies. I had to start the engine to put some amps in, and the intake salt water alarm went off. At first, I couldn't identify the alarm; it had never gone off before! Great. What else can go wrong? Actually, this was an easy fix. The strainer was 100% blocked with that green moss crap; cleaning it took care of the problem, and the engine is fine. Earlier I had decanted our jerry jugs into the tanks as we'll go for diesel soon. This morning, we went shopping for provisions. Hours later, we returned to the boat in a downpour, but at least we made a major dent in the shopping list. One thing we've all agreed on; if you see something somewhere you want or need, buy it then and there; don't wait. For example, there's not a great selection of meats here, but these were readily available at other atolls we've visited. At any rate, we've managed to knock off quite a few things in the last 24 hours; I hope the next 24 are a bit kinder.