St John’s Part 1

We are at the coastguard pier, our small boat dwarfed by all the other craft surrounding us. Nearby, there’s a security cabin with what, is at the moment, is the solution to my most pressing issue, a flushing toilet. Yes, it’s time to say a not very fond goodbye to the kitty litter. This is definitely one thing I won’t miss. 

In parallel with the intermittent stench from the water treatment plant across the road, there is a large coastguard vessel on the dockside being sandblasted as part of its refit.  The constant noise of the high pressure hoses for most of the day  is matched by the drone of the engines from the other large vessel just down the way.  This is not very yacht marina’esque. But for some reason we get accustomed to the din and stink and don’t really notice it after a while. The good thing about this location is that we have 24 hour manned coastguard security and of course access to a flushing toilet.  

I make my way into town to locate a warm shower and walk towards a gym which allows visitors to trial their services 3 times for free. On the way I am surprised to see that Water street has been closed to traffic and turned into one long strip of outdoor restaurants and pubs, some with live music….at 1030AM.  Most of the pubs are Irish too…it shouldn’t be a surprise to me but the sheer scale of it does. Newfoundland was heavily settled by Irish immigrants from the 17th to the 19th centuries and their descendants are everywhere.  Some 20% of the population claim Irish ancestry but the figure is probably understated. There is a road tour called the ‘Irish Loop’ down the coast the way we just came which some locals tell me has very strong regional accents which they find hard to understand. In the street, I chat to a guy with this huge 180lb Newfoundland dog. Nothing about the dog is normal size as he stands there patiently for us to take our snaps, drooling a small puddle on the road. 

Smelling as fresh as we can muster, we grab an Uber to the other side of the peninsula to collect the new radar which F had delivered to a yacht club over there. We lunch on a couple of beers and somehow forget to eat.   We get talking to the club manager to try to arrange a meet with some local sailors to get advice on conditions here. They are super friendly. We resolve to come back that evening for dinner to try hook up. Uber must love us. It just launched here a couple of weeks ago and I think we may be already on their high rollers list. 

Over the next days, F continues his ultimately fruitless search for a refill or replacement gas bottle for the boat. It’s clear that there just isn’t enough gas left to complete the trip and the emergency gas stove is just too precarious to use at sea. Eric is tasked with bringing all sorts of hoses and connectors with him and F does the unthinkable and breaks faith with his beloved Euro gas bottles. He buys a US standard one and even considers buying a second. He pedals off on his micro bike with it in his rucksack to get a fill. 

With the gas situation (probably) resolved, the other task outstanding is to get the radar going. In Halifax, I purchased a new iPad to run the navigation and radar software. Leaving Halifax, I discovered I had made a  schoolboy error when the navigation system reported our position on the bank of the harbour and then promptly stopped when we were at sea. There was no GPS chip in this version of the iPad.  You need a cellular version to get that for $200 more. Thanks Apple. 

Once again I crank F up the mast. We are definitely getting good at this. The radar is hoisted aloft and we hook it up to the shiny new 2nd iPad and then try to make sense of the mess of images on the screen.  Selune is  surrounded by the dock and big metal hulks so we see a splurge of reflections so this is not surprising. F and Eric will have to figure this out for themselves when they get clear of here.

Then just when you think everything is sorted, disaster strikes. We have had this recurring problem with a misalignment of the main sail track high up on the mast. There’s a slug of metal which seems to have dropped to the bottom which was probably the part keeping the two sections of the track aligned.  Whilst I am dozing, I hear this crash of something hitting the deck and get up to investigate. I meet F looking sheepish as he points to a gap in the sail track where the source of the noise used to be. He was investigating the slug from above and removed the part of the track used to install the sail track cars. It has gone overboard into the murk of the harbour. Bugger.  I get my camera out on a 4m pole and wave around under the boat.  It’s so murky I can’t even see the boat above me never mind a 20cm billet of aluminium somewhere in the silt. The sail can’t be raised until this part is replaced. This is serious.