There’s always one more job to do…..

We are on holiday 😉 we have been on holiday for a few days now. Only the first part of the holiday has been spent doing more boat jobs in Cartagena. We managed to get a wonderful couple of hours sailing on Sunday ahead of the serious work starting. It was fabulous, the weather conditions were great and Gemini J performed brilliantly. We had friends aboard including the lovely Sarah who was a first timer. As we headed out of the harbour in Cartagena Skipper Nigel’s eyes lit up because the wind was fabulous, blowing around 12 to 15 knots in fact it was almost chilly on deck when we were in the shade of the sail. We had both main and genoa out, but both reefed to keep things comfy for our passengers. As we were coming back in we had to navigate our way through a regatta of traditional sailing boats which were stunning to see but looked quite difficult to sail !!

Just as we were getting ready to leave for the holiday earlier in the week we found a leak, getting progressively worse. The culprit was the grey water pump, that’s the pump which takes the waste water out of the boat. It was something that needed to be fixed and as usual, never a simple story. We asked the boatyard for a quote to fix (extortionate) then we decided to tackle the job ourselves, with the invaluable advice of our lovely boat neighbours. We ordered a pump, we waited for it to arrive and then the fun began! Taking the boat apart, the pipework goes more or less half the length of the boat and as you can imagine as it basically goes under the floor it is a pretty horrific task. It involved us crawling all over the floor and squeezing our arms into gaps and places that you wouldn’t normally need to go. Removing the hoses at the beginning of the job wasn’t too bad, however, reinstalling the new hoses, (after we’d been to the chandlery to buy a great length of snakelike pipe in between times) was a bit of a nightmare. This was definitely a team effort, with guidance from our neighbours too and with lots and lots of huffing and puffing we managed it. In addition the connection to the tank which holds the grey water was found to be corroded so another bit of ingenious invention on Skipper’s part fixed that problem and the new pump was installed.

This was a very different story to “toilet-gate” there were no lost tempers aboard and although the job went on over a few days it seems like this was the right approach – slowly but surely and now we have a fully functional grey water pump and we’re back in business.

Whilst all this was going on the port of Cartagena has seen some of it’s busiest days as far as cruise ships go, which is always entertaining for us. We had one day with two huge liners looking over us.

Another day we enjoyed the luxury Crystal Espirit (62 passengers to 91 crew!!) being completely overshadowed by P&O Britannia, one of the more modern looking super cruise liners with over 3.000 passengers aboard. It was great fun watching them come onto berth but it’s also always a relief when they leave at the end of the day, especially since Britannia was carrying out crew “exercises” and testing their alarm systems during the morning which was not exactly peaceful!

And whilst all that has been going on we’ve been enjoying the first few days of our holiday, relaxing in between stages of boat work and today that will involve studying the forthcoming weather forecast, if it proves amenable then perhaps tomorrow we’ll set sail…. and meanwhile, around the marina…..