Tuesday, April 27, 2010
I woke up early with a headache (I didn’t eat much on the flight and those drinks weren’t a smart thing on an empty stomach) and grabbed two Aspirin from my toiletries bag. They tasted odd and I realized that I’d taken some powerful painkiller prescribed to me a couple of weeks ago when I got hit with a painful bout of lumbago. I hadn’t taken them at the time and the only pills I ever have are Aspirin, so the mistake was an easy one to make in the dark. I can confirm that the painkilling effects of those two tablets were great and lasted me throughout the day.
Floating in analgesic heaven, I drifted to the main office and paid the remainder of my storage bill, then got my yellow ticket to give to the Travelift operator and headed to the boat to replace the Gori Propeller sacrificial zinc anodes. I got that work done quickly, plus scraped a couple of things off the bottom and greased the prop mechanism. Even though it only took about an hour, I was drenched in sweat and looking forward to getting the boat hooked up to power at the dock and turning on the air conditioning.
Somehow, the batteries had discharged down to 8 volts instead of the expected full 12.5V charge (I have no idea how that could happen, since the wind generator was left hooked up an running) so I had to get a technician from TMM yacht services to come by with a big heavy starting battery to help me get the engine started. It fired up immediately on the first try and I motored to my assigned slip and plugged into power. The batteries started charging and the main AC worked, but the aft cabin unit was just pumping out warm air and the front AC unit is still inoperative due to a missing electronic motherboard, but the central units made massive efforts and cooled the main cabin down to tolerable levels.
Since the sun was burning down outside and there was hardly any breeze, I started work below decks. The first thing (after shopping for water and turning on the fridge) was to attach my new knives and knife rack. I forgot the device that I had gotten to keep the knives in the rack during heavy weather, but I’ll manufacture a new one here and just remove the knives when underway until then. The two knives on the right in the picture are the only 2 knives that were originally aboard Zanshin I.
I don’t know where all the dust came from, but I needed to do some cleaning up in the front cabin to make it ready for habitation again, and will continue with de-dusting the interior tomorrow. Despite what felt like a lot of work, the place is still a mess but since I’m on vacation I’ll go into “Island Time” as well. I met Barry, Alison, Kayla and Quinn on Solitaire, they have put up the boat for sale and are returning to Canada after a year and a half of cruising the Caribbean. We ended up going to Mulligan’s for dinner and, as always, their burgers were superb. Despite attempting to stay up longer, I passed out around 9pm with lots of things left to do.
 |  |  |  |
 |  |