NOW YOU’RE COOKIN’ WITH GAS!
Thursday, October 09, 2008

Our galley stove is in fact a Magic Chef three-burner stove/oven that was probably installed shortly before Vilisar was launched in Victoria back in 1974. Although the pilot light would work, we never trusted the oven and did all our cooking and baking stovetop. Recently, the front burner had pretty much stooped working and one of the back burners didn’t put out much flame either. Except for the enamel front and the inside of the largely unused oven, the whole cooking top was rusting and unsightly. It was time for something new.

For those of you not familiar with boats, there are basic rules of cruising life established I believe by Queen Elizabeth I in the time of Sir Walter Raleigh requiring that any remedial step taken on a boat require at a minimum six prior steps, that your boat become effectively disabled during the process, that the vessel be completely unable to manoeuvre for the duration and that your living quarters are turned into a squalid mess until the tools are finally put away everything is put back together. This usually takes eight steps and many weeks. I offer these insights for those who think cruising in a sailboat is in any way romantic. Last week we removed the starboard fuel tank. We decided therefore to refurbish or replace the galley stove. The connection is not so obvious: the stove looked like hell anyway and, to get at the fuel-tank mounts we had to get behind the stove.

Since Wacho, mechanico in general, was unable to find anyone locally at first who could refurbish the cooker, we had pretty much decided upon a concinetta (a Chinese-made table-top cooker). Fortunately, a repairman showed up at Wacho’s to say that he could totally refurbish our galley stove, including replacing all the propane burners and leads, replacing any of the corroded and rusted metal bits and spray painting the back. The guy lives with his wife and seven boys out in the barrio of Franca at the edge of Leonidias Plaza. He looked a right thug, to be frank, and I should not like to meet him in a dark alley. I could also not understand anything but the bare minimum of his extremely rapid and rather inarticulate local dialect. I never did understand his name, for example. But he said he would do the work this week and one of his boys, Jonathan, would help him All this for $45! I hesitated for two nanoseconds. You go, man! He was nowhere near as threatening as he looked, either. He was in fact as mild as a lamb. Ab it shy, in fact. He did all the work in Wacho’s work yard, kneeling or squatting in the sun for a long day.

Wacho himself supervised the project and did the spray painting. He also did the running around in his truck to a welding shop to get tinplate bent and some replacement parts handmade. It was a warm sunny, tropical day and nobody had any lunch. I was fading fast even though I had no real work to do except go along to pay for the paint, the nuts and bolts, the welder/bender, etc.

The replacement bits were fashioned by hand out of galvanised sheet metal. It was just like shop class back in school. Like ‘Amigo Felix’, our tank welder, I think the other welder and bender (called ‘El Columbiano’ though he was by no means a Columbian) was pleased to be able to fashion a whole object and not just do the run-of-the-mill, mend-and-make-do projects that he usually gets. He whistled and sang the whole time. Wacho selected this second welder because he also had a large metal bender (not strong enough for bending tank steel tanks but certainly strong enough for our tinplate).

Late this afternoon the galley stove was re-installed and tested aboard Vilisar – with the repairman on board, I might add (it’s kind of like making every parachutist pack his own chute; if we were going to blow up I wanted him on hand). The stovetop works, the oven works and everything is just fine. Tonight we plan to have fried-egg sandwiches and tomorrow the first onboard espresso in nearly a week. Hurrah!