Hello all.

I have 2 new pseudonyms. Pirate which is my daily name of choice. And Chef Grant (African naked Chef) which comes out less often. Nevertheless I use both but mostly am referred to as Daddy which, as any parent can attest, can be a very overused word when spending lots of time with your kids. Daddy can I… Daddy what is… Daddy come see… Daddy stop… I guess I love the attention so I shouldn’t complain too much. But in all seriousness, I have enjoyed the past (almost 2 months) enormously. Getting to spend so much time with your kids everyday teaches you so much about them and can be (carefully chosen words) terribly rewarding. The same is the case for spending so much time with your wife. I have often said this in different situations but I am terribly lucky. I never get bored with spending time with my lovely wife. We are massively different and definitely enjoy different things but the reason I asked Delphine to marry me is because I simply never get bored with her company. If I got stranded on an Island somewhere I truly do hope it will be with her because having company you always enjoy is the biggest treasure in life.

Another interesting thing I've found about relationships, is that slowly slowly over the years your interests get closer together. When Delphine and I first met, I think it would have been difficult to find too many common interests. But over the years we have both moved closer and closer together. Well to be fair I think Delphine has moved closer to the wild side. From braving our honeymoon on top of a Land Rover through Africa, to sailing all over the world, to diving under the ocean, to watching sporting events, to learning to fish and to hiking mountains. For me I would say that my appreciation of architecture, literature, art and theatre has grown enormously. So slowly we rub off on each other. If this is positive then I think the relationship matures like whisky. Always better with age. Excuse my ramblings… I am no psychologist and I best get back to the point of this post.

As I stated earlier, we left 7 weeks ago and we are still dealing with boat issues. I guess when your yacht goes through a pandemic (captain and crew cannot get to the boat) and a tsunami (as ours did in Teos marina 8 months ago) you can expect to find a problems. But I didn’t expect some of the problems we are experiencing. So for all those who think our adventure is all sunshine and cocktails here goes the backstory.

We set sail from Didum D-Marin Marina on 5th May expecting to work out a few small issues. But almost immediately (same day) we noticed water in our port engine as well. The reason I reported on In a previous post was from the transmission oil cooler which had cracked and was leaking salt water into the oil. This is a huge problem which cannot be fixed easily and required us to order a new part from Sweden (Volvo Penta Headquarters). At the time we thought the reason it had cracked was probably human error (someone standing on the wrong place) when we replaced the battery bank which are stored in the port engine-well but on reflection it is more likely poor service work. Let me elaborate.

Late August 2019 we sailed our yacht into Teos marina near Izmir city in Turkey. The plan was to leave her here until the summer 2020 when we would explore the coast of Turkey. As we had just completed 3 full months sailing the Mediterranean we checked her into a full Volvo service. This is normal practice you would do before winterising her (a term used to describe leaving your boat for the winter with no plan of using her). As you all know the summer of 2020 didn’t materialise and Arabella laid quietly in the marina. No real concern because she was under the watchful eye of our friend Sean. However, tragedy hit when an earthquake of 7.0 on the Richter scale struck off the coast of Teos causing a tsunami which wrecked the marina Arabella was in. We were lucky to escape with mostly cosmetic damage but still Arabella would need significant work done to make her ready for 2021. So we sent her to Didum D-Marin Marina to get hulled out and placed on the hardstand to get all the repair done. Included in this work was another full service on the engines. So in total we had 2 full services done on the engines with almost no additional hours on the engines. Now, most people would believe this would result in engines in perfect working order but sadly not.

The most important element of winterisation is flushing the engines, pumps and any parts exposed to salt water with fresh water and remove the build-up of salt which promotes corrosion. Based on the fact that every part of the yacht which has connection with salt water is now completely corroded and destroyed, one would have to believe that neither service was actually done properly. All pumps relating to AC and Watermakers needed to be replaced, both oil coolers are corroded and one was cracked and both heat exchangers were completely corroded and cracked. I think it is pretty clear that some works were not done properly.

So what does this mean. Firstly we are currently stuck in Gocek with no working engines while waiting for parts and our plans have been set back a week or so. The repairs are expensive and annoying but as the Chinese say, ‘If a problem can be solved with money, you have no problem.’

Looking forward.

Next week we will send Morgan and the crew off to Mykonos. We will take a 45min flight from Bodrum to Mykanos. With the current rules we cannot sail into Greece but our yacht and crew can. You help me explain this but with Covid many things are unexplainable. So that is the plan.

After Mykanos we will cover the following islands over a 3 weeks period:

Naxos

Santorini

Folegandros

Milos

Serifos

Kithira

Zante

Kefalonia

Ithaki

Lefkada

Paxos

Corfu

before sailing through the Messina straight and up to Capri in Italy. After Italy we will go to the kids favourite place in the world - Portofino. These will be our only real major stops in Italy and then we will move onto visiting friends in Monaco and France. Well that’s the plan. Who knows what will really happen.

Anyway, hope you keep following our journey. The naked African Chef will be posting a new recipe for Cloud Eggs soon. So look out.

Love from Gocek.

The Horsfield Crew

Below are some pictures of the corrosion.