Yesterday Eric was up early to work on the generator. He added more coolant. He took apart the intake hose to see if maybe something was stuck (or maybe even growing) inside it. It was totally clear. Then he tested the flow of the water from the through hull. It seemed slow. Hmmm. Something was stuck on the intake under the boat. We did a quick check on that before, but did not find anything. Something to check again when we get to cleaner water.

The streets were again decorated with banners, different from the ones we saw last week, and also with flags. The fireworks started at 0800. By 1000 we could hear several marching bands playing in the street.

We were in no rush to leave, so we decided to make a stop by the maritime museum before heading out. Like most of the buildings in the area, the museum is made of limestone and each level has crazy high ceilings. The museum is fairly large, and it has a nice collection of the standard maritime museum stuff. There are all kinds of old navigation instruments, uniforms, weapons, anchors, fenders, amphoras, really early inverters, and other accoutrements for life at sea. In a room of more modern equipment, there were even some missiles. There were models of all kinds of boats throughout the display, and one entire room was turned into a full scale model of the engine room of a real Maltese dredging ship, the Anadrian. There is an exhibit on the history of the steamship, as well as an exhibit on the era when the British turned Malta into a major naval base. And, oddly enough, there was a traveling exhibit featuring clown art. It was kind of random to walk from the life-size replica of a work ship into a room full of clowns.

After we left the museum, we headed out on Kosmos. We really didn’t need to leave for Tunisia until sunset, but we wanted to stop by an anchorage called The Blue Lagoon off the island of Camino, between Gozo and Malta Islands. We were told it is just beautiful and we would love it. Apparently, everyone in the entire country of Malta who owns a boat decided to go there, too. It was a zoo. We were pretty uncomfortable with how tightly packed the boats were, so we anchored out in the fringes, only to have some other boats drop anchor disconcertingly close to us. We were also shocked at how fast some of the boats were zooming around in the anchorage, weaving in and out of the anchored boats and getting much too close to hulls and anchor chains.

Eric donned a mask and jumped in for a swim. He started checking under the boat and ah hah! He found a plastic bag stuck in the intake on the port side of the boat. It turns out we were mistaken about which through hull the generator was attached to when Christi did the quick check. Eric excitedly got out and turned on the generator. It was back to normal temperature and there was no white smoke. Yay! Generator mystery solved. Eric also cleaned the Continue reading →