On May 13th, we headed to Cane Garden Bay to celebrate the life of our friend Jason. There was a beautiful gathering at the lovely Indigo Beach House attended by many of Jason and Tiffany’s friends. It was a very nice remembrance of someone special in our BVI community.
During the cooking show shoot, one of our generators started acting up. Dirk said he heard a pop sound and then we both smelled something oily. He checked and found a significant amount of oil in the bottom of the generator case, so we stopped using that generator and began using the other genset. We made an appointment for the day after the memorial service to go visit the mechanics at Nanny Cay Marina to have the Genny looked at and to have some upgrades made to our running rigging (the lines and sheets that control the sails).
Previously, before we knew we needed to have the Genny looked at in mid May, Dirk scheduled a dentist appointment and by the time it rolled around we were still in the middle of (part 1 of) the whole generator debacle. What does one do when their big boat is in another country and there is a need to go back to the USVI? Well, I’ll tell you what Dirk does, and that is take the Tender! Not many souls are up for this endeavor - a 14 foot inflatable dinghy with a 60 hp engine traveling all the way from Tortola to Yacht Haven Grande (50 nm round trip), but then there is Dirk… He set out and had a relatively uneventful trip on the way to St Thomas, but on the way back he was going upwind and banging into the chop. By the time he arrived, he said his legs were like noodles from standing while driving and bracing against the waves.
When Dirk came back from the dentist, we got TERRIBLE NEWS ON THE GENERATOR! Two of the cylinders weren’t firing so the genny engine was pretty much DOA. UGH. NOT what we needed as we were planning to leave for the trip North in the next day or so. We had a few options to consider, and the most attractive one, due to the huge lead time on new generators and the fact that this one had only 10k hours on it and we thought we could get 20k, seemed to be to ship just a new motor for the generator from the States and have it installed before leaving on our passage North.
All we could do was wait. And wait we did. The motor was in Florida, so that was good news. All that had to be done was put it on a container and ship it, then it would take a while to clear BVI Customs and finally we could get the motor installed. Of course, in order to install the motor we would have to remove the entire generator from the boat by crane and take it to the mechanics’ workshop where they would remove the bad engine and bolt on the new one.
Now our trip through the Dominican Republic and Bahamas, which we originally planned as a leisurely month-long float, was looking decidedly less leisurely, but what could we do? We decided to make the best of it and just hang out in the Virgin Islands and maybe even hop down to St Martin one more time since we were playing a waiting game with this generator engine. We had a few other things on our list but they would be pretty quick and we really didn’t have much else to do until the genny engine arrived from Florida.
