Our Pitufa plus gear is generally very benign–when things break they usually do so at a suitable time (if there’s ever a good time for that…). E.g. the windlass stopped working just before we sailed to Tahiti where spare parts could be found, the clew of the genoa ripped off just 4 nm before we reached Huahine and the fuel line of our Yanmar engine decided to get clogged up when we were motoring out on the ocean on the way up here to the Marquesas. I don’t even want to imagine what catastrophes could have happened if the engine had just quit on us while navigating through a narrow pass with strong currents in the Tuamotus or in Maupiti. Brrrr.
When the engine died with a few blub-blub-blubs on the last passage we cleaned the diesel filters and found a little red sausage in it. Hmm. We immediately knew what had happened. After Christian had cut open the diesel tank 2 years ago in the boatyard (in order to clean out the goo that had accumulated over 25 years) he resealed the tank with red silicone which now started to dissolve. Therefore we emptied the tank, filtered the diesel, opened the tank again, thoroughly cleaned it and this time we put proper gasket material in. The whole procedure took 2 days and then we spent another happy day splashing around with diesel while refilling the tank in short breaks between tropical rain showers (it took 3 dinghy rides with jerry cans).
Now we’re ready to go sailing again and it looks like there’s a phase with northeasterly wind coming up which we’ll use to sail to the southern group of the Marquesas.
