Day 102, Year 5: It Has To Get Better
Date: Friday, February 5, 2010
Weather: Sunny with Haze
Location: Bolgatty Hotel Anchorage, Cochin (Kochi), India
It’s been a long week of searching for boat bits and we know it has to better than this. We’re starting to feel like everything is going wrong, and we know that is not the case. We just need to get one thing fixed or at least ordered. Early this morning we got an email back from a Danfoss dealer in Florida who could send us the compressor for $475 and the shipping would be $450. Too much! We found out last night that we could order a whole unit from West Marine for $700 and the shipping would be about $200. Still too much. So our thanks go to Michael who reads our logs and sent us an email message that we search for a distributor in the UK. We did just that, and finally we had some success. We can get the whole unit for $550 and the shipping will be $150. This is definitely sounding better. And while emailing and calling back and forth with the distributor in the UK, we continued to call the Danfoss centers here in India to see if they could get a unit for us. We still have not heard back from them, so we haven’t placed the order yet, but it looks like we will be getting the new compressor unit from the distributor in the UK. If we place the order on Monday, delivery should be in seven days. So it is our hope that we are on to a solution for that problem, and Michael, we thank you for that.
Now to the toilet issue. Mark spent the part of his day, when he was not on the phone, patching cracks in our Jabsco plastic toilet base. We are letting it cure for 24 hours and using a bucket in the meantime, so success on that one will have to be reported tomorrow. And we are still hopeful that Anil is getting a new toilet for us, but he still cannot tell us what brand, so we don’t know yet if the new one will fit. One way or another, we are hoping the toilet issues are solved by tomorrow.
I spent part of my day defrosting the refrigerator and the other part researching those things we would like to do while here. We want to do a canoe trip through the waterways that trickle inland and do some village tours where farming continues like it has for hundreds of years. We also want to visit the tea plantations and go to at least one of the wildlife preserves that are only a few hours bus ride from here. We will make a small start tomorrow by taking the ferry to Fort Cochin to experience a Kathakali performance. ‘Katha’ means story and ‘kali’ means play. So a Kathakali performance is a story acted out in mime with music. The stories are from Hindu mythology and much of the grandeur of these performances is in the intricate make-up worn by the performers. We will see the make-up being applied from 5 pm to 6 pm, and then watch the performance from 6-7:30 pm. After that we will be treated to traditional Indian music and dancing. So we are definitely looking forward to this.
We heard from Robert and Tina of Shirena who are now in Salalah, Oman. They are dealing with problems with their auto pilot and their watermaker. They say the people of Salalah are very friendly, but they are not fond of the anchorage. Fatty and Carolyn of Wild Card are there and are hoping to leave in the next couple of days. Fatty’s one-year old battery bank has been giving him fits, and when he arrived he found a hole in one of the cells. Robert said he just sealed it, poured more acid in, and is going on. I laughed aloud when Robert said that he had contacted RayMarine about his auto pilot problem and they just said to contact a local dealer and use the back up (which they assumed all boats would be carrying) in the meantime. Robert said he was going to email them back and tell them that he would get the spare from the sailboat they are towing just for the extra parts! I laughed aloud when I read this.
We tried to do a video Skype connection with our daughter last night, but it did not work. We did have a phone connection, however, and found out that Sam has been having full-blown asthma issues and that Jonah has another ear infection. Sam really wanted to do a video connection, but we could not arrange that last night. But he did say the he misses us very much and that was enough to bring tears to my eyes. Oh my, how much we miss those grand babies. We will try for a video Skype call with Heather and gang on their Saturday morning. Hopefully that will work.
And we ended the day with margaritas and burritos on Constance. Ed has a secret recipe for margaritas and they were great. Before we left we got to see some photos of Ed and Lynne’s families and their new grandbaby. It was a delightful evening away from thinking about boat problems. We are looking forward to more times like this in the coming days.
