Scenery; Boredom; Scenery

Sunday, September 22, 2019

Today’s run to Palermo will be a long run, but hopefully it offers a nice place to tie up and rest.  Dropping anchor last night did not provide me with a great deal of rest.

Like I stated in my post for yesterday, I arrived in Lipari as dusk turned to dark, and the general rule is to not enter an unknown harbour after dark.   I approached the marina, but it was tight and not at all clear whether there was space, nor a sign with a VHF channel to call.

I turned away at the entrance and went to the noted anchorage which had a single large cargo ship tied up.  Being lit up like a Christmas tree, I could see the shore (a wall of rock) and the charts suggested that I could get my anchor down to a reasonable depth.    I was about 200′ from shore and dropped my anchor in 120′ of water.   If I were 300′ from shore it would have been more like 600′ of water.   One other aspect is that the wind was diminishing, but if it kicked up, it would push me into deeper water, not against the shoreline.

After a small meal and engine room checks, it was time to sleep…that didn’t go well.   In any case I got an early start, lifting the anchor at the crack of dawn and started picking my way through all of the fishing boats.   The scenery around these islands is quite spectacular, and there are more volcanos, just spewing a bit of smoke here and there.

[Pictures may come later, I am too far from land now for a decent signal.]

The water isn’t completely flat, but there isn’t much going on the water after getting away from this group of volcanic islands.  That means that the ride has been pretty smooth and the speeds are pretty good.

One problem I have mentioned a few times, is the overheating of my stabilizers and, in effect, the engine room.   I can solve the problem by leaving the engine room doors open and portholes in the master cabin and lazarette door in the cockpit.  Unfortunately in anything but calm seas, these are significant safety issues, not to mention getting things wet that shouldn’t be wet.

I recently installed that new blower and thought that would solve the problems.   It clearly made things better, but it didn’t solve the problem.  My engine room is getting too hot.   When I wasn’t sure if I was going to get a drop-in replacement blower, I bought another blower that moves 233 CFM.  I don’t really have it installed properly, but I wired it up and just laid it down over the engine, pointed it toward the open engine room in the rear and turned it on.   It took about 15 minutes to drop the engine room temperature back under 120F.   Yay!!

Okay, so that didn’t work . . . That blower got so hot that it fried in about 15 minutes.   Hmmm.

It is worth noting that three days have passed since I started this post, and I won’t finish it here with all of the details.

I made it to Palermo safely . . .