It started off kind of lazy, but turned into a bit of a work day. Since we had such nice weather, we decided it would be good to get some “dry weather” projects done. First on the list is the darn leaky chainplate that’s been plaguing us across the Pacific. I most recently “fixed” it in NZ about a month ago and it popped open again on our passage. Leaked like a sieve. When I pulled the cover, it turns out the Sikaflex I used never really bonded to anything. It just scraped off both the metal and fiberglass parts. Today I took off the shrouds, cleaned out all the old gunk, Ann wiped it down with alcohol, I taped around it for glueing and then used a new product I’m trying called Bostik. It’s a construction grade adhesive that has a bit more elasticity than the marine products. I used it on the other side forward lower shroud and it held on the crossing, so cross fingers that the sixth time’s a charm on this one.

We also shlept water in five gallon jugs from shore to add to our tank, which is almost empty. 20 gallons worth. Over and back, over and back, each time having to pour each jug into the deck plate through a homemade funnel made from a plastic Gatorade bottle with the neck cut off. We needed to do this in the break between rainy days as the water system here is very suspect when there’s been a lot of rain. Apparently the filtration system gets overwhelmed. Local knowledge is that when you flush the toilet if the FRESH water coming in is dirty/brown, don’t drink from the faucet. Needless to say we waited for it to stop raining for two days, flushed and found clear water and even then have put some Clorox in the tank for added protection. Normally, we would use the water maker instead which filters the water as well as desalinates it, but without the engine, we don’t have quite enough power to run it.

Lastly, in the category of the helpful cruising community, a big thanks to Bob and Linda on Bright Angel. We needed a new manifold gasket in order to put the engine back together (hopefully) tomorrow. A new one is on the way from New Zealand thanks to help from John and Lisa, but it won’t make it here until the end of the week. Bright Angel’s engine is very similar to ours and the gasket is exactly the same part number and they had a spare. Score! Thank you Bright Angel. Now we can rebuild everything when the parts come in tomorrow instead of having to wait another week. Yay!