Shamballa Cruising Yacht Club: We’re Back in the Water!

After over a month ‘on the hard’ in a rather grubby boat yard (and that is being generous), climbing a 10 foot ladder to get on and off the boat and having limited plumbing facilities, we have finally launched Songster and are back in the water. Mind you, we have only gone a few hundred metres onto a pontoon in the marina but there is water under the keel and we have an occasional gentle rocking motion onboard and our spirits have soared.

Songster ready to be lowered into the water

Celebrating our first night on the water with an Aperol Spritz

The delay on the hard was part of the ongoing saga with our propeller. When we got the new engine in 2015, we were told we were slightly under-propped and, although not essential, should get a slightly bigger propeller (2’’ larger). We did this the next year and really had no end of issues with it. For the first four months the propeller sang. It drove us nuts. It was so noisy and would sing different pitches (a 5 note pentatonic scale like a gamelan orchestra) depending on the revs of the engine. After a bit of trial and error we fixed the problem permanently by putting a chamfer on the trailing edge to stop the vortices which produced the harmonics. (A temporary fix is to let little sea creatures populate the blades, thus interfering with the vortices. This happened when we were in Skiathos harbour but the problem returned once the propeller was cleaned).

Although the propeller gives us lots of thrust, it also produces lots of drag while sailing. Now that we are planning to cross the Atlantic we really do not want to have the anchor like drag on the boat with this propeller. So we decided to get a folding or feathering propeller which reduces drag so that we theoretically can go about 1 knot faster under sail. On a long passage of say 2-3 weeks this will cut several days off the voyage. So we ordered a beautiful Flexofold propeller from Denmark. Sadly it did not fit our propeller shaft. We sent the propeller back to Denmark – Thank you Flexofold for being so helpful.

Ah what might have been.....

Blades folded when under sail

We started talking with other propeller manufacturers in England and Germany. After lots of emails and phone calls we discovered that our propeller shaft was never machined properly and we must get a new or re-machined shaft. We spent several weeks trying to get the job lined up here in Sardinia to no avail. We concluded that there just is not the expertise or inclination or available time for anyone to do the work. Plus none of the mechanics speak any English and it is just too dicey to try and do such technical things through Google translate. So we have cut our losses and put the old propeller back on and will get the work done at a bigger and better equipped marina in Spain.

We have lined up Almerimar Marine services to deal with our propeller shaft in July

We have not been totally idle while on the hard but outside of doing research on propellers, I must admit we have been very relaxed. We have taken long walks admiring the street art along the canal and spring flowers.

Another day we went in search of the flamingos in the salt pans east of the city.

Flamingos feeding in the salt pans

A close up

A large flock flying overhead. They struck me as being like large geese.

We checked out the Omani training ship which was in port for a few days. The Shabab Oman II, is made as a traditional square rigged ship tall ship but build in 2013. It was a lovely ship and when one of the officers found out we had a sailing boat ourselves gave us a special tour showing us the helm and other places.

The Shabab Oman II

Bob and I at the wheel

Then to assauge the guilt of being totally slack, I finally got around to servicing the winches, a task I had been putting off too long. It is a messy job but I quite enjoyed it. I gowned up to protect myself from the grease and felt like I was back in the AIDS lab.