The Best Bar in the World, Maintenance and an Unexpected Adventure

We are now anchored in Kardamena, Kos which is one of our favorite spots. It is quite touristy, but it has a big open area to anchor in, a world-class bar called The Stone Roses and reasonable protection from a north wind.

After we got here the aft toilet decided to stop working. The last straw was putting a Darcy offering in the toilet. It looked like it was mostly sand but I flushed it anyway. Bad idea. It took me 2 days to fix. The first day was the worst (I won’t describe for the same reason that H.P. Lovecraft didn’t really describe Cluthulu) except that I was very happy that whenever it became too much I could go up and jump in the beautiful clear cleansing sea-water outside the boat. The first day I took apart the mechanical and ‘spinning’ parts of the toilet that pushes the stuff up a tube into the holding tank. 4 small screws…..2 of which are hard to remove and one you can’t see or reach with your right hand…..but eventually I got them off. Putting them back is actually harder. In any case it definitely needed cleaning. Darcy had eaten string and other stuff besides the sand which needed to be removed which I did. All nice and clean. Put it back together. Still didn’t work.

So the next day we moved ‘up the stack’ to the hose connecting the toilet to the holding tank. Last year I replaced this on the front toilet (took me 4 days). I did this when Victoria was not on the boat and it was quite the ordeal since I didn’t really know what I was doing….but now I do!

The issue is these hoses get plugged with struvite, which is formed when you mix urine and sea-water. Struvite is not very soluable in fresh-water or sea-water and even in vinegar and is hard as rock-salt and not easy to manually remove. The parts I need to keep (flapper valve and toilet parts) I soak in a hydrocloric acid solution of about 8%, but the long hose I just cutup and threw out because I had a replacement hose on board (leftover from fixing the other toilet last year).

Cutting and removing the hose and replacing it took a few hours….but the toilet now works! Very happy! Victoria and I celebrated by going on shore for a nice dinner and we went to The Stone Roses for their amazing strawberry daiquieries and I also had an amazing G&T (you can pick from several gins and several tonics and pick your own veg/fruit sides). Love this bar. Only wish they served natchos! I’m going to try to work my way through their drink list while we are here.

We go back to the boat for a supposedly quiet night. The winds are forecast to be not so high and I am looking forward to getting a nice sleep after my days of maintenance.

At 4am my anchor alarm goes off. Sometimes this happens when countries play with the GPS signal, or maybe a software problem, but I could tell it was very windy and we were probably dragging. Up on deck I could see the wind was 40+ knots (74+ kph) and we were definitely dragging. There was a boat behind us just to the side but no rocks. Start the engine (it always immediately jumps into life which is so comforting) Victoria and Darcy are now up. In winds like this it takes about 1/2 throttle just to control the boat which seems like a lot when you are anchored. We have to pull up a bit of chain, remove the anchor snubber (a thick stretchy line attached to the chain with a rolling hitch which works wonderfully to hold the chain) and then pull-in the rest of the chain with the windlass. We start doing this and the windlass stops maybe halfway. The chain is stuck on something. There were big rocks in the area on the bottom and I think the chain is stuck under one of the rocks. Since we are not moving backwards any longer I idle the boat and consider staying like this for the night (just a few more hours) but it is not the best since if the chain gets loose we will be dragging again. I try moving the boat to one side to free the chain and it does come loose and we manage to get the anchor up again. Rememeber this is in 40+ knots of wind, at 4 am in pitch dark coditions, so it is a bit exciting.

We could have just re-set the anchor where we were, but the anchor looked pretty set before so I decided I don’t trust the sand in this area as much and head over to the east of the bay away from the other boats. Driving the boat at night is a little challenging too since you can easily see the shore but the boats are almost invisible except for their little white anchor lights. We manage to maneouver to the side of the bay and re-anchor and the anchor holds immediately. I re-attach the snubber (I love doing this since the knot is so simple and works so well) and at 4:45am or so we are all back to bed.

In case you are curious as to why the winds picked up so much (forecast for 15 or so knots, ended up with 40+) I think I know what happened. Here is a diagram of our boat position from the anchor alarm app:

The label #1 is us on the dingy going to and from shore. The multi-colored lines are where the boat moved at anchor and the #2 line is us dragging. North is up in the diagram, and you can see that the winds were from the NW usually and when we started to drag the winds were from the NE. The other lines you can see us recover from the drag, do a little loop where the chain was caught on the rock and then finally head west to our new spot. Now here is why we dragged:

Here is a google maps view of where we are located:

The little picture of Victoria is where we were anchored, and you can see that NW there is some hilly terrain, but NE, which is where the high winds came from, there are hills that are 400m+ in height and I’m sure the terrain effects from these hills pulled down higher-speed winds from a higher-elevation (winds are much stronger as you go up) down to our little boat. I have great respect for how terrain effects wind after sailing in Greece.

Anyway, now all is well (Olla Kalla!) and we are anchored and waiting for the winds to die down again. I think my next trip to Stone Roses I’m going to try one of their ice-cream based drinks because I definitely need the calories 😉