Das Boot

Shamrock was finally launched (pics) and I motored it around from the Suzuki works to our chosen marina (incidentally, ‘marina’ here means somewhere where they take your boat out of the water with a boat lift and use a fork lift truck to store it on a platform in a multi-storey garage –pics later). It being my first time in charge of my own boat, and having little petrol and no emergency oar (tsk), I was a little nervous about the whole affair. Anyway it went off without a hitch and the boat performed admirably (as, I felt, did the Captain (yo no soy marinero – soy capitan)). Unlike on the following Tuesday, when el capitan took out his first passenger (Naice, of course), for a pootle about on the Rio Taruma (the Taruma Acu, as opposed to the Taruma Mirim, for those interested).

I decided to take 20 litres of petrol along in my spare tank, along with a coffee strainer and a coke-bottle funnel (see earlier post), and all was well until I tried to get the petrol into my main tank. The result was that much of it ended up in the boat and all over me…so we had to abandon this idea and motor over to one of the floating petrol stations (pic) to put R$20 in the tank from the pump. We asked the guy if he would strain it through the coffee filter and he was happy enough to do so. Having thus rescued the situation, we cast off and…couldn’t start the motor. As we floated gently backwards into the petrol station flutuante, I suggested to the attendant that his petrol must be really bad, although I’m not sure he thought this was funny.

Anyway, we floated off again, slowly into midstream and vaguely back towards the marina in the far distance, turning the motor over as much as we dared. After a few minutes of this, I decided an alternative strategy was required, so I sat at the back wrestling with the cover of the motor and trying not to fall in. I succeeded in getting the cover off and checked what I could (I’m not going to take the plugs out or anything, now, am I?). A visual inspection indicated that all seemed OK, so I replaced the cover and re-primed the fuel…and it started first time. Go figure. Hope it doesn’t happen again.

I have to run the motor in for 20 hours before I can give it a good thrashing, and at the moment I can’t even get it to plane at the revs I’m allowed to give it (3,000 rpm). It’s now done two slow hours and counting…