TripSailor.com® Sailing Blogs

Morning all. We’re still here, still riding what appeared to be slowly subsiding Northerlies on a beautiful clear day with blue sky, cumulus clouds, and the deep blue water you always here offshore sailors talk about. Still looking for the elusive green flash, but got some phosphoresence in the wake last night. John phoned home about the watermaker, and we have some new tricks to try this morning.

John and I spent the morning working on the watermaker — about half getting access to the thing, which lives under our presently cluttered forepeak bunk and gear storage and then trying to get access to things that weren’t really meant for access at sea . . . and the other half proving that we could pump less salty, but still too salty, water from the ocean into the the boat. We’re not giving up, but we think there’s a issue with the salinity probe, which we can’t get at to clean, and have no spare for. We have plenty of water, but that means no showers and such.

Next up on our chore list is trying to manually turn over the deisel. If we can do that, we’ll likely get it started. If not, we have to leave it for fear of throwing a rod. Much discussion aboard of better designs for keeping seawater out of the exhaust, but none that help us just now. Anyway, if the weather’s good, we’ll tackle that tomorrow. But don’t fret — it’s a sailboat after all, and we have a generator to charge the ship’s batteries.

While we were below doing that, the wind freshened considerably, and is back up to 20-25 knots pushing us down the course on what’s turning out to be a spectacular day. We’re not too far from the halfway point now, both lovin’ the trip and looking forward to being there.