Still at Tahanea

Ann fixing the headboard on the mainsail.

We didn’t do the pass dive today like we thought. Turned out some weather came in during the night. It’s been “close” to rain all day-occasionally spitting-and very cloudy, so we decided to turn it into a boat project day. The one moment of nice weather was at sunset. The clouds to the south of us went away and as the sun set in the west we saw a very green flash. One of the best yet. But by the time we finished dinner and dishes the almost-rain had started again. It has also been windy-a constant 18 knots all day long combined with the two foot waves that come with a five mile fetch from the other side of the lagoon. Yeah, I know-complain, complain, complain. Hopefully tomorrow will be nicer.

Anyway, Ann did the laundry and sewed up a new sail slug attachment on the mainsail headboard. These break about every six months due to chafe. They hold the sail to the mast with three layers of thick nylon webbing. It’s a bigger job than it sounds and took her at least two hours. She also cleaned up after a porthole leak that went down into the food locker (nothing lost since all is vacuum packed) and most important made cookie dough. No cookies for tonight but we’re having Orcinius over tomorrow night for fish chowder, home-made bread and fresh baked cookies! Simple pleasures.

For my part, I took apart the tiller-pilot to find out if I could fix it. We have it attached to the wind vane when we’re motoring and it steers the boat, but the other day it make bad noises and gave up. Turns out the (ahem, Raymarine) tiller pilot has a cheap nylon/plastic retaining ring that keeps the motor aligned with the belt that drives the jack screw. The mechanism “ate” the ring, or at least part of it and it came off, which in turn meant the belt fell off its pulley. There’s really no excuse, since when mounted on the wind vane, there is almost zero effort the thing needs to make. It just swings the vane from side to side and the Monitor does the work. I was able to jam the retaining ring back into its mount and it’s working for now. We’ll see how long that lasts. If it breaks again I’ll have to jury rig a Teflon washer to hold the motor in place until I can get the proper part (if they will sell it at all. A stupid, cheap part. Seems very poorly engineered). Anyway, (rant over) after fixing the tiller pilot I downloaded a bunch of photos from the cameras. A very unproductive job but we take hundreds of photos every couple weeks and if we don’t keep after them, the photos get waaay ahead of us and it becomes a much bigger job. Also it’s been three months since I checked the water in the batteries, so I did that and added ½ gallon of distilled water. Charging and discharging every day, they get quite a workout and need to be carefully maintained. Next check- up: September first.

OK, new rant: The B&G multi-function displays that Svendson’s Marine sold me when I bought Charisma are all starting to conk out. These are the displays that show things like depth, boat speed, wind speed/direction, etc. Three out of four of them have lost their night lights, so you can’t see them anymore at night without a flashlight. I reconfigured the last “good” one at the helm so it displays the critical data at night. They also are developing “lines” through the digital displays. Looks like corrupt data. I cleaned all the contacts/connections and there are fewer lines interrupting the display, but I think they need a software update at the very least. Turns out the “state of the art” displays Svensen’s sold me in 2008 were actually 2005 models that were sitting on the shelf and they wanted to sell them to someone as they were getting obsolete. They’ve been problematic since the day they were installed. OK, second rant over.

For dinner, I took last night’s chicken and yam “thing” I made in the pressure cooker and threw it in the cast iron frying pan with some curry powder. Bam! Instant curry chicken. It actually tasted better than it did last night.

So, it’s only 7PM and we’re finished with dinner and both of us are exhausted from boat projects (and probably a little bit of catching up on sleep from the trip here and maybe the fact that the anchor alarm faithfully wakes me up at least once and sometimes twice per night. I have it set pretty tight since we’re right up against the coral and it’s blowing 18-20 all night. Thus, whenever there’s a 20 degree wind shift we drift far enough to one side to set off the alarm). It gets dark around 5:30 local time and at any rate, we’re about ready for sleep.

Hopefully tomorrow some news on snorkeling. There’s a lot of cool stuff here to see-we just need better weather to see it with.