A myriad of jobs have been ticked off on board Shimshal and she is now all tucked up in a sheltered corner of the excellent CNI Shipyard.
She will be pampered while we are away with some beauty treatments which include a thorough hull polish and a freshly painted boot line. When she is launched next year she will get a professional 3,000 hour engine service, a rigging check and a new high speed data network between radar and plotters. A local sail maker has repaired the leach of our staysail and restitched our dodger. The thread in the latter had succumbed to 17 years of sunlight.
The other casualty of the last 5,000 miles was the obselete rectifier that got fried in the gale we encountered between Tahanea and Fakarava. The fuse had blown but not before the electronics had been totalled. I removed the redundant wind turbine and, in doing so, discovered that the aluminium socket that supported the base of the turbine’s pole was completely corroded through. The whole wind generator installation had definitely come to the end of its life!
For the next 10 months Shimshal will get a fortnightly visit from a caretaker who will tend the dehumidifier and search for infestations. If a rare cyclone should threaten Raiatea then the caretaker will remove our long suffering boat cover, solar panels and fit ratchet straps to ballast blocks even though Shimshal is sheltered by nearby buildings. If a cyclone does strike we will be keeping our fingers crossed!
