Stuck in Cape Town

Cape Town from Table Mountain

So here is a long over due cruise update. It has been a disaster, to put it lightly, so far. I will fill in my weekly adventures with pictures soon, but I thought I should get an overall update of what has been going on with the boat and our cruise status. I arrived into Cape Town on the 25th of August. We had a normal two days in port to get everything ready before we headed out for Rio. We got about a day out to sea when we stopped to do a test station for our CTD carrousel. Two major things went wrong. The CTD wasn't functioning properly and we lost our port screw, so we only had one engine running. We got the CTD working after hours of troubleshooting, but the engine would require us to return to port.

This would result in about 10 days for the new engine parts to be shipped, clear customs and get installed. During this time we had a mini vacation and a few of us rented a car and set out on an adventure through Africa (I'll follow up with more details on my next blob). The new engine parts eventually got installed and we set out for the day to do sea trials to test the whether or not the new installs were functioning properly. To much dismay they test were unsuccessful. This has resulting in another 10 days in port, of which we are on about day 7 or so. At the moment there are is no set schedule on when we will get out. We are waiting on more new parts as well as the technicians to come install the new parts. Needless to say we are all getting tired of Cape Town at this point. We have all been here for close to a month or more and the overall moral isn't all that great, especially knowing that we have a 36 day cruise ahead of us. I'll try to get some pictures of our adventures up soon.

-J