Apocalypso

In June last year, we were offered a job skippering a $2m dollar yacht from Bora Bora to Fiji.  The money wasn’t great, but the owners were friends of ours, so we decided it would be a nice experience (it wasn’t, but more on that in another post). So, armed with our charts (apparently $2m dollar yachts don’t need them) and a big dollop of optimism, we put Calypso to bed in a small yacht club in Port Phaeton, Tahiti and jumped on a plane for the short hop to Bora Bora.

Several months later, having delivered that posh yacht to Fiji, toured around NZ in a van and visited Europe on a book promotion tour, we returned to find our boat in an extremely sorry state. The guy who was meant to be looking after, well, wasn’t.

Port Phaeton is very wet in the monsoon season and it is important to keep the watery stuff on the outside of the boat.  The guy looking after our boat had not done that.  Instead, he had managed to put his foot through the cockpit locker and (for reasons best known to himself) not bothered to cover up the hole, despite there being all kinds of boards and tarps within spitting distance.  Furthermore, the cockpit drains were blocked with leaf debris (and plastic wrappers for the de-humidifier crystals that our boat ‘carer’ was still replacing despite the boat being flooded out) which meant the cockpit was filling with water which was pouring over the bridge deck into the companionway as well as into the boat via the busted cockpit locker.

This flooded out the batteries, which stopped the automatic bilge pump and things just kept getting worse.  In short this is what we came back to.

Boat flooded out with over a meter of oily bilge water

No Electrics

No Batteries

Black mold everywere

Much laquer destroyed

Mushrooms growing from the instruments

Very rusty engine where it had been sitting in water (new coupling destroyed)

Busted instruments

Busted radar

Busted outboard

Floorboards rotten and swollen

Much wiring destroyed

Cockpit locker lid destroyed

Green decks

Fridge compressor (which lived in the cockpit locker) completely rusted out and various personal possession damaged (including my bloody saxophone).

A certain amount of swearing was also present.

When I first arrived, I did not have the heart to take photos so, these are how the boat looked a week later – still pretty bad.

Anyway, that was about a month ago. Since then, Jasna and I have been cleaning, scrubbing, repairing, mechanicking, epoxying, sanding, wiring, servicing, shopping – and then doing it all over again, to return Calypso to her former glory (which is partly why we have been a bit slack on our posting).

Buckets of sweat and all the money we made (and then some) from the delivery later, and we are nearly back to normal.  At the very least, the light at the end of the tunnel does not appear to be an oncoming train.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a week or two, we will be ready to hit the high sea again and continue our adventures. Despite the disaster, it is good to be home.