Arnold decided to have a go at spear fishing at the rocks on the north side of the bay. I decided to stay on the boat and change one of the two compass lights that had blown. This was a job that I must do before I set off for Costa Rica and I figured that I'd better do it while there was an electrical engineer on board.
Changing the compass light is tricky. In Opua we took the compass into the boat shop to change a light and Bob, a sharp member of the staff, had to telephone the distributor for instructions. I took my time and figured things out without doing any damage but I am a slow worker and it was 4 PM before the job was done.
Arnold returned after two hours and before I took his line I asked him to hand over the fish. There were no fish. He said that the rocks were a fantastic snorkeling site with plenty of bright fish swimming around; but the fish were too small to spear. He rinsed off the salt water, we had lunch, then he took off with our two 10 liter containers in search of water and some sightseeing. By the time he returned with the water my compass light job was finished and the boat was tidy again. I then had a swim in the ocean in my underpants and tee shirt. In the cockpit I had a shampoo and bucket bath and rinsed the underclothes in fresh water and hung them out to dry.
It was going to be a movie night: either "The Perfect Storm" or "The Boat".
Tomorrow I plan to rewire the compass lights so that their switch is the one in the cockpit that used control the anchor winch. At the moment the compass light switch is at the navigation station and it will not be activated unless the "instruments" breaker on the panel is switch on, which also switches on the Navman depth sounder which we want to bring up only if the Raymarine depth sounder fails.
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1 comment:
Be great to see those brightly coloured fish that avoided being speared.
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