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An article published in "Cruising" magazine published by the Cruising Association.
The Text:
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Nigel Morley and his partner Julie Smart were frequent contributors
to Cruising. Sadly Nigel died in September 1997. Their last few months cruising were spent transiting the Red
Sea in their boat "GLADLEE OF GUERNSEY". This short account of a major problem demonstrates the spirit of a man
who calmly dealt with the following. “There was a loud rattle coming from under the hull, we stopped the engine
at once, Julie took a look underneath and found that the Cutless bearing had come loose from its sleeve and had
slid forward along the propeller shaft”… |
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Sunday 7th October, 1996 Massawa
We have had a frustrating week. It started well enough,
with a reasonably confident assurance from the port manager that a crane could be made available to haul us
out. The skipper of a British motor yacht on local charter recommended us to a DHL agency in Asmara as well as
to the port agents, where a Mr Solomon undertook to contact the senior engineer at the shipyard on our
assumption that the Cutless bearing could not be repaired. Next we phones Telesonic Marine in London, having
meanwhile learned that Horst’s wife Sieglinde would be flying out from Frankfurt on Thursday and could bring the
bearing with her. A most helpful Rod at Telesonic didn’t manage to arrange a connection with Sieglinde, but he
did confirm dispatch of the bearing via DHL, ETA Asmara Friday. Total phone bill around £45, but it seemed well
worth it, and meanwhile we’d had an encouraging enough first meeting with Mr Afwerki, the dockyard engineer.
Wednesday was spent freeing up the connections on the shaft and rudder (plus some much needed sanding of
woodwork and a difficult repair to the loo pump), and by Thursday morning we were ready to join Horst in
catching the early bus up to Asmara. Apart from picking up the bearing (or so we hoped) we needed another break
from Massawa, where the temperature has scarcely dropped below 95ºF(35ºC),
even at night. There is generally some breeze during the day, but when it stops the atmosphere is stifling, and
it’s impossible to do anything below decks without dripping with sweat. Massawa is kept remarkably tidy
compared to some ports we’ve seen, but the environment is inevitably dirty, and a good deal of grit and
dust transfers itself to the boat and to us. With
limited water available it’s not easy to keep even superficially clean - it’s amazing how much dirt sticks to
skin and hair in only a few hours - which adds to the general discomfort. Fortunately we have had the option of
retreating to the relative coolth of the Eritrea Restaurant in the evenings, where the food is decent and the
beers still refreshingly cold! Otherwise the town behind the port is becoming quite familiar - parts of it must
have been quite distinguished once, with Italian-style pavement colonnades, substantial town houses and shops,
and the occasional overhanging wooden balcony, perhaps dating from Ottoman times. It’s very run down now,
though, and This time the bus journey up to Asmara was uneventful, and we reached the Legese Hotel shortly
before noon. The DHL office turned out to be a 20 minute walk away, so we made our number there, passing the
British Consulate (just moving in to new premises, as it turned out), on the way. Later we spent a pleasant
hour browsing through newspapers at the British Council library before a good supper in the Legese’s
restaurant. We are increasingly struck by the friendliness and intelligence of the people here and their easy
and relaxed manner with each other (also between the sexes, which seems fairly unusual in this part of the
world). Asmara is a modest enough capital city, but it must be one of the safest and most comfortable for a
stranger to wander about in. We met Horst’s wife Sieglinde over breakfast on Friday before walking down to DHL
again, where we found no package; however they were expecting three items from London via Addis Ababa in the
course of the afternoon, so we weren’t too disappointed. We called at the Consulate for a chat with the
Honorary Consul, Dr Hicks, then whiled away the time until a phone call to DHL in mid-afternoon brought the news
that there was nothing for us on the flight from Addis. This was a blow - the next flight from Europe wasn’t
till Saturday night, so there was no chance of our getting the bearing before Monday. There seemed little point
in staying on, so we caught the early bus back to Massawa yesterday morning. A rain shower had left the boat in
a filthy state to welcome us back, but our kindly neighbours on a tug had done their best to look after the
boat, stowing cushions in the shelter of the sprayhood and adjusting our mooring warps. There is nothing we can
do here until the bearing turns up - fingers crossed for tomorrow - and the only positive development has been a
message from Phil (relayed by Jo during an R/T call) giving us a contact point in Salalah for picking up visas
and charts. Salalah just seems a long way away at the moment................... some of the grandest buildings
still lie in ruins as a result of the civil war.
Saturday 12th October, Port Smyth, Shumma Island
Not a week for the faint-hearted, though it ended a good deal
better than seemed possible on Tuesday evening. Our replacement bearing eventually turned up on Tuesday
morning, but meanwhile Afwerki at the shipyard had failed to keep two out of three appointments to discuss ways
and means of lifting us, Solomon had had the effrontery to suggest that $100 would be a reasonable reward for
his services, and we’d been hurriedly moved off the quay and alongside a tug to make room for a freighter to
unload. It continued to be stiflingly hot, and sleep was not made easier by heavily amplified music from the
terrace of a nightclub a couple of hundred metres away. On a brighter note we engaged the friendly Weldemichael
(recommended by Rod Heikell) to do our laundry, and after a heavy hint from Gary in Antalya we invented a “ham”
radio callsign for ourselves and established contact with Tony Britchford at Kilifi Creek in Kenya, who runs a
daily net covering the entire Indian Ocean. A French yacht, “Decibel” , came in and rafted alongside
us: Francis, Ginette and their friend and crew Philippe provided welcome distraction as Tuesday evening found
us in an apparent impasse. Solomon reported that Afwerki had made enquiries about suitable strops with which to
lift us, however none were available, even at the naval base. Nigel’s visit on the back of Solomon’s motor-bike
to the port’s own small workshop drew a blank as well, as did visits to a couple of private boatyards. Without
strops of some kind a crane was out of the question, but without lifting the boat a metre or so off the ground
we couldn’t drop the rudder to remove the propeller shaft to replace the Cutless bearing............ The one
remaining hope was Afwerki’s half-suggestion that we chock the boat up at low water over at the shipyard - we
hadn’t taken this terribly seriously, but at this stage straws had to be clutched. Wednesday morning saw us
biking round the bay to the shipyard, where Afwerki gave us a none-too-clear outline of his proposal: we should
bring “Gladlee” over to the beach (officially referred to as the “dry dock”) at high water and ground
her as close inshore as we could, and as the tide fell Afwerki’s team would arrange to jack her up to the
requisite height. With “Gladlee” drawing a good 1.3m and a tidal range of only 0.8m we couldn’t for the
life of us see how this was going to be done (with hindsight, Afwerki probably didn’t either!), but we seemed to
have no choice but to give it a go - they had evidently managed to drag several quite large ships on shore to
work on them, so perhaps “Gladlee” ‘s relatively modest all-up weight of 7-odd tonnes wouldn’t present
too much of a problem. Back on “Gladlee” we explained the situation to our new French neighbours, who
immediately offered to tow us over to the shipyard. We used our dinghy and outboard again to manoeuvre over the
last few metres, and Afwerki and a couple of helpers hauled us alongside what looked like a tank landing craft
and on up the beach until the rudder touched bottom. There we sat to await developments: we could get no very
clear idea from a slightly impatient Afwerki what he proposed doing. |
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High water was an hour and a half or so away, and within a few minutes a
team of seven appeared, including a foreman in blue overalls bearing the legend “Dry Dock”, a portly bosun-type
figure with a face-mask, another diver (without face-mask) and a variety of helpers. These set about
manhandling large chocks of wood under “Gladlee”’s stern, an operation which involved one diver or the other
submerging in four feet of muddy water to guide the blocks into position. After watching this for a few minutes
Nigel joined the party in the water and offered his face-mask and snorkel to the second diver. The mask was
gratefully accepted, though the snorkel wasn’t a great success – in spite of a careful briefing the diver
evidently thought it would supply air with the top end underwater (it didn’t!). Eventually a bed of blocks was
in place, the tide started to recede, and a massive rusty jack was produced and positioned under “Gladlee”’s
counter, the load spread by battens and a sheet of polystyrene to protect the gelcoat.
At this point Afwerki invited us to give the go-ahead for lifting – sensing
that this was not the moment to seek Westerly’s blessing on the operation we reassured ourselves that the boat
was solidly built and crossed our fingers. The jack was cranked, the stern started rising, centimetre by
centimetre, and chocks and wedges were carefully put in place on either quarter to support the hull. By
mid-afternoon (the yard normally stops work at 14.00) the boat was canted at an unlikely angle forwards, the
jack itself had been chocked up higher, but we still had to ask for more – that rudder stock is longer than it
seems! Afwerki himself stripped down to his shorts to join his team in the water, the handle of the jack was
almost too high to reach, the chocks were starting to look distinctly precarious – and then finally the top of
the stock came free and the rudder was lowered into the water.
We applauded, the team knocked off, and as dusk fell a solitary
night-watchman sat and watched as we removed the shaft and cleaned it up, replaced the cutless bearing and
repacked the stuffing-box. As darkness fell we headed for the shower (a stand-pipe over a blocked squat toilet,
cold water and no light, but a wonderful luxury by that time), and afterwards to a bar along the road which
served nothing but cold beers – we had five each before returning to cope with dinner and bed on a slope. There
were some disconcerting cracking noises during the night (compressing polystyrene, we eventually realised), but
in the circumstances we slept pretty well.
Afwerki was quite relaxed about relaunching us when he appeared early the
following morning, so we spent a couple of hours cleaning up and checking over what we’d done before the team
arrived to unchock us. This operation produced the only mishap of the entire operation: the jack slipped and
“Gladlee” dropped several inches on to her rudder, though quick thinking by the crew got the remaining chocks
out so that she remained on an even keel. Fortunately the only injury was a gashed finger, and we decided that
Westerly construction could probably cope with a relatively modest bump. There were mutual congratulations all
round – Afwerki all smiles after what must have been quite a difficult challenge – and the team seemed pleased
with the tip we decided to leave on top of a remarkably modest bill. We made our way carefully back to our
berth in the port, this time rafted outside “Decibel”, whose crew had gone up to Asmara (Horst and Sieglinde
visited us briefly at the dockyard before taking themselves off in “Inspiration” for a cruise round the Dahlak
Islands). Solomon at the port agent’s was genuinely delighted with our result – though he may not have been
quite so delighted with his tip – and we called in to thank “Vana of Clifford” (whose skipper Kelvin had offered
help and advice when we first returned to Massawa) and were generously entertained to cold beers. For what we
hoped would be our farewell dinner at the “Eritrea” we chose injara, the curious local flat bread made of
fermented millet, and zigini, a beef stew eaten with the fingers: this seemed to please our usual waiter, and
after a couple more beers we felt pretty pleased with life too – how fortunes can change in a couple of days! |
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