The failed exhaust elbow replacement went well, completed last Tuesday, but a new problem arose when I tried to start the engine – it wouldn’t start. Having seawater sprayed on the starter motor for several hours from the exhaust elbow leak likely caused some other problems. I pulled the starter off and bench (galley counter top) tested it. The motor spins but the solenoid is not kicking the starter gear into place to engage the flywheel; it’s possibly rusted stuck. It might be fixable but I may need a new starter motor. There may be collateral electrical problems I’m just now beginning to understand.
While in Medana Bay considering the best course to fixing my boat, I am immersed in a new book by Paul Theroux entitled “Burma Sahib”. Well known for his many novels like “Mosquito Coast” and engaging non-fiction travel books like “Dark Star Safari”, Theroux turned to historical fiction this time to describe the life of a young Eton graduate Eric Blair who, in real life and for reasons never clear to himself, signed up to be a British policeman in Burma in the early 1920’s. The book describes the imagined twists and turns of maturing Blair’s life as he navigates the brutal, racist, exploitative hegemony of the British Raj and deals with the society and bureaucrats that ran it, their sparsely-furnished minds hypocritically justifying the coercive control of the India subcontinent. Several years later Eric Blair became famous for his jarring, yet no longer very far-fetched, projection of humanity’s dystopian future under his pen name George Orwell.
On one of the first days at Medana Bay I decided to walk into a town a few kilometers east with another sailor here for repairs – Barry Perrins, aka Adventures of an Old SeaDog, a YouTube sailing video sensation with over 120,000 subscribers. Just as we started down the road ,the marina owner Peter Cranfield (an Englishman who settled here long ago) drove by and offered us a lift. That lift turned into a 3 hour tour of the north side of Lombok, passed rice paddies, Hindu temples, Muslim mosques, and the verdant countryside of Lombok with its active volcano Mt. Rinjani, at 3,786 meters high the second highest point in Indonesia. It last erupted in 2016.
Yesterday I shared a vehicle and driver with a few other cruisers on trip south to Mataram, the main city on Lombok, in search of tools, parts, provisions, liquor, etc. It’s a bustling place including an upscale shopping mall with the usual American restaurants (KFC, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Starbucks, etc.) and boutique clothes shops, international brands you’d likely find in big malls all over the world. It was a good break from the routine of the Medana Bay Marina which has become very familiar after being here 2 weeks.
