Day 345, Year 6: A Tiny Success
Date: Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Weather: Partly Sunny Day; Rainy and Cooler Evening
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
After more than a month of having a problem with our pressure water system, Mark thinks he finally found the problem today. On a boat you have a pressure tank that keeps the water flowing to all the different faucets. When you run water, the pressure tank kicks in and then it shuts off. Well, for the past month, our pressure tank never shut off. It just kept running all the time. So we had to turn off the pressure water and only turn it on when we needed to take a shower or brush our teeth. Otherwise, we used the foot pump in the kitchen to get water. Mark has searched and searched and searched to find the problem, but it eluded him. Today he found a/the problem. We’ll hope it is THE problem. The last time he cleaned the filter in the water system, evidently a gasket fell out and he didn’t know it. Without that gasket, the system was constantly sucking air. So today he replaced the gasket and so far so good. He also took apart a couple of winches that had frozen up and got those working again. So he had a good work day on Windbird.
We also got a bit of good news today. BoatUS received a copy of our recent survey and the underwriters were so happy with the survey that that waived the necessity of an out-of-water survey in the spring and lifted the ban on us sailing the boat from October 15 until we are on a dock in Kingman Marine on November 15. Their deal was that we could only sail the boat the one day from here to Kingman after October 15. But evidently the survey sounded good enough to convince them that we are not going to sink anytime soon and we can keep sailing.
I spent my morning continuing to wade through our Year 1 logs and name them correctly. I’ve now made it through the first 100 days, but there were more than 400 days in that first year, so I have a ways to go. I picked up the boys at 1 o’clock and took them home for naps. I cooked an Indian curry dinner for everyone and Mark drove in from Woods Hole with Jed so he could join us. The weather is noticeably cooler tonight and the forecast is for cooler weather tomorrow, Thursday, and Friday. Then it starts to warm up again. Weather .com says it will be 77 degrees F on Sunday. That sounds almost tropical. We will be out sailing all weekend, so the report for warmer weather sounds great. The only problem is that the winds look light. So we will get out the spinnaker and hope to enjoy a warm weekend with hopefully enough wind to move us along.
