Santaclaus arrived in Honiara

Monday afternoon I got my hands on the package with the latest gadgets for Morning Light.  This included an Iridium satellite phone (for use in emergency).  And a new AIS (Automated Identification System) included an active VHF splitter (to avoid making the same mistake as last time: blowing up the AIS when transmitting with the VHF radio). 

Also included was a little case for the hard disk of the broken MP3 player.  This did not fix my MP3 player, it now I got my 20GB of music back and I can play it on the computer.  I have been enjoying listening to my lost music all morning.

Spent some time configuring the satphone and the data connection.  Took a little bit of twiddling with drivers, services, settings and serial ports, but I got it running using Peter (Sayonara)’s USB to serial convertor (Iridium’s internet is notorious for being critical about which USB to serial convertors work).  There should now be a way to send and receive emails (from a special account) at sea, and I plan on sending regular position reports on longer passages.  These should automatically be posted to the web site (you can expect a test post over the coming days).

The only thing that went wrong was that I had ordered the wrong computer memory.  I might be able to trade that here with the local internet cafe, computer and electronics are very expensive here because of import duties (that can be as high as 80%).  Just this morning my external keyboard failed, it started to produce double characters.  Opened it, but can’t find any way to fix it.

Paid the office of C-Corp a visit and was lucky enough to run into Gary. He is the kiwi I had been in touch with to sort out the repairs to my boat.  He called his captain and he should be coming to my boat with dive gear to have a look at the keel and rudder.  So now I am back to waiting for them to pay me a visit (that is not the first time).

There is not sign of the repairs going to happen any time soon.  The yard in Liapari (that is a few days sailing away, in the Western Provinces of Solomon Islands) is not busy, but they do not have any materials there to carry out the repair.  What I need is epoxy, preferably West System.  Noel (the guy at the yard) has email me the rates, and suggested some places to locate epoxy and anti-fouling paint.  I received some rates for the use the slipway, it is not going to be cheap and need to make sure that the time on the slipway stays limited.

So I went to the local store for epoxy and yacht paints, well, they are closed until January 5th.  So it is looking like I will be here for Christmas and New Year’s.  I am pretty much in a similar situation as last year, need to time these disasters to be further away from the Holiday season.

Also made a lot of trips through town trying to locate engine oil. Well, no one has the right type, heavy duty 10W40, oil.  I think my best bet is going to be 15W40 from Mobil.

Things are not working very well here in Honiara.  The power gets cut off at regular intervals.  Apparently they have received some new equipment through international aid, but the maintenance of the equipment is lacking, and so are availability of spare parts.  So, almost every day power will be off for a few hours.  The phones are not working much better.  This is a prime example of a place where you consider yourself lucky if you got one thing done on a single day.

Luckily I am still enjoying hanging out here at the yacht club.