Day 188, Year 5: Rain, Rain, Go Away
Date: Sunday, May 2, 2010
Weather: Overcast Day, Rain During Night and Morning
Location: Ile Fouquet, Salomon Atoll, Chagos
It was a dark and stormy night and morning. The rain stopped late morning, but the sun didn’t come out to play today. We took advantage of the rain water this morning and washed the dodger and bimini cockpit covers inside and out. We’re still trying to get rid of the Cochin dirt and I now think we have done all we can do. Some of the streaks of gray still didn’t come out, but I’m sure they will disappear in time. Probably just in time for us to reach Richards Bay in South Africa where we will be waiting for the right weather to head to Cape Town. Unfortunately, if the winds are blowing as they did last year, the coal dust from the inland mines all ends up on the boats in Richards Bay. Then the fun starts all over again.
The rainy morning gave us an excuse to continue watching programs in the Blue Planet series. We watched two of the programs last night and two more this morning. This is an old series that was done jointly with the BBC and The Discovery Channel, so some of you might have seen this. It is all about the world’s oceans and it is fun to watch it while sitting here on the ocean with nothing to see for hundreds of miles except ocean. Tonight we are hoping to watch two more programs. Then we’ll wait for the next rainy day to continue. Tomorrow we are hoping for sunshine so I can continue my varnishing in the cockpit. I was hoping to do five coats but if the weather doesn’t cooperate, I might just do three coats for now. We are suffering from not having our living space outside that protects from the rain, so we are both anxious to get the cockpit varnishing completed so we can live outside once again.
Mark’s spent his day working on a leaky toilet. He thought he had this fixed while in India, but last night, the aft head sprung another leak. So he dug out the toilet repair kit that we had sent to India and went to work. Unfortunately, the new parts didn’t fix the problem, so he broke out the 5200 caulk and did a little glue job on the pump unit. He has to wait 24 hours to reconnect things, so we are using a bucket tonight. More fun!
Tomorrow morning I will varnish early and Mark will continue with his head project. Then we’ll take a break and go for a visit on Mirage. Jeff and Kathy have invited us over for morning coffee. Jeff and Kathy will be leaving soon, so it will be nice to get together.
