We're still in Mackay, at the marina.
Its quite a glam marina with groomed gardens, fancy holiday apartments, swish restaurants
and trendy pubs.
The rest of the town, or at least the parts that we could see from the bus, is frankly quite ugly. Its a just like Voortrekker road but without the poverty. Sprawling industrial sites merge into low functional and cheaply constructed commercial buildings with no style or appeal and residential neighborhoods of neglected plain low houses. Yet it is probably quite a nice place to live and bring up a family. Everything works, everything is clean and everyone is super friendly and helpful.
The tide here is hectic. The full range from spring low to spring high is over six meters. And they get cyclones here, so the shoreline is far back, tall and heavily reinforced.
The inter-tidal sand flats are perfect for long beach walks
The reason we're here is to get Pegasos lifted out of the water so that we can get the prop-shaft issue finally resolved and redo the anti-fouling paint and get a few other repairs sorted. Lifting a boat out of the water is always a big event.
Positioning the travel-lift slings.
And up ...
And out ...
And finally parked on the hard:
We've spent a week here, living on the boat and getting lots of things attended to.
I dig living in the boatyard: lots of cool boats, neat engines and other fascinating boat bits lying around and skilled tradesmen doing their thing. Marcelle on the other hand hates living the boatyard: lots of boring boats, greasy engines and other rusty bits lying around and grubby tradesmen doing their thing And now we're finished doing all the things that we need to do. But the travel-lift crane has broken down and so we're getting and extra night in the boatyard for free. One of us is happy!
5 comments:
So how does a prop shaft break? And get fixed?
Didn't really break the prop shaft itself. It just needed to be accurately aligned and properly supported with a pillow box bearing, and the flange that connects the shaft to the polyflex gearbox coupling was also replaced.
We got caught on a sandbank about a month ago and got towed off. Once we were free the tow rope got caught around the propeller and pulled the prop shaft out of the coupling at the back of the gearbox. While the boat was in the water it was not possible to get behind the propeller to push the shaft back into the coupling with enough force to get it all the way back into position. With the shaft only being partly supported it wore out the coupling. The hole that the shaft slides into at the center of the coupling eroded away and came to have a bigger diameter than the shaft so the coupling would just spin without gripping the shaft. I did a few interim repairs trying to bond the shaft to the coupling but in the end the job had to be done properly.
I'm sure Marcelle now deserves and equal number of hours of dragging you around mall?
Let's try that again ... and check the spell checker this time! lol ! Marcelle deserves AN equal number of hours shopping ...
I trust you're happily out sailing again! So pleased to read that Pegasos is successfully fully repaired! xxx
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