After a fairly uncomfortable but otherwise uneventful passage,
Gentle Wind has arrived in Noumea, New Caledonia. We're at the
end of the Visiteurs dock (yep, that's how they spell it in
French!) for a couple days while we take care of various and
sundry maintenance items.
The weather didn't really cooperate with us, as we had head
winds up to 20 kts and head seas of 5-7 feet with as short as
5 second period for most of the passage from Suva, Fiji. It
wouldn't have mattered much, but those darned Naiad things
went Tango-Uniform for the third time. Ouch!
We thought we'd fixed them in Suva, having found a number of
slow oil leaks and seeps. However, about an hour after we
left Suva, the oil level started dropping, and we dumped one
full quart into the bilges within 20 minutes. At that rate,
there's no way we could have kept the reservoir filled, so we
had to shut them down. We continued to lose oil for short
while, then the level stabilized. So we figured we'd try one
more time and added a quart. The level was stable for half
an hour, and then started dropping rapidly.
We still haven't figured out from where the oil is escaping,
but our current theory is that there may be insufficient
cooling water for the hydraulic oil. So it gets really hot
and eventually passes some threshold, and something just
"gives out". When we shut down and let the oil cool off a
bit, we temporarily recover. So now we gotta figure out
what the "something" is and fix it, as well as determine why
the cooling system isn't cooling it enough. (For what it's
worth, cooling water for the hydraulic fluid is provided by
the main engine's raw water pump. After the raw water is
circulated through the heat exchanger, some of it is sent to
the stabilizers' oil reservoir for cooling.)
Anyway, we'll be here in Noumea for a few days, waiting for
a weather window to get across the Coral Sea to Brisbane.
We hope to find some nice East to NorthEast winds and seas.
After a fairly uncomfortable but otherwise uneventful passage,
Gentle Wind has arrived in Noumea, New Caledonia. We're at the
end of the Visiteurs dock (yep, that's how they spell it in
French!) for a couple days while we take care of various and
sundry maintenance items.
The weather didn't really cooperate with us, as we had head
winds up to 20 kts and head seas of 5-7 feet with as short as
5 second period for most of the passage from Suva, Fiji. It
wouldn't have mattered much, but those darned Naiad things
went Tango-Uniform for the third time. Ouch!
We thought we'd fixed them in Suva, having found a number of
slow oil leaks and seeps. However, about an hour after we
left Suva, the oil level started dropping, and we dumped one
full quart into the bilges within 20 minutes. At that rate,
there's no way we could have kept the reservoir filled, so we
had to shut them down. We continued to lose oil for short
while, then the level stabilized. So we figured we'd try one
more time and added a quart. The level was stable for half
an hour, and then started dropping rapidly.
We still haven't figured out from where the oil is escaping,
but our current theory is that there may be insufficient
cooling water for the hydraulic oil. So it gets really hot
and eventually passes some threshold, and something just
"gives out". When we shut down and let the oil cool off a
bit, we temporarily recover. So now we gotta figure out
what the "something" is and fix it, as well as determine why
the cooling system isn't cooling it enough. (For what it's
worth, cooling water for the hydraulic fluid is provided by
the main engine's raw water pump. After the raw water is
circulated through the heat exchanger, some of it is sent to
the stabilizers' oil reservoir for cooling.)
Anyway, we'll be here in Noumea for a few days, waiting for
a weather window to get across the Coral Sea to Brisbane.
We hope to find some nice East to NorthEast winds and seas.
