The wind and waves have finally settled down and last night the boat was quiet and almost becalmed all night and I slept very well indeed. I’ve been keeping track of my energy consumption via the Xantrex for the past two days and my energy use is quite a bit higher than I thought. The main culprit remains the fridge, but I’m aboard a lot at the moment and am using the inverter to drive the notebook and monitor as well. I fired up the generator to recharge the batteries and fill up the water and decided that I’ve been using my one tank almost exclusively and it was time to refresh the water in the other tank, which has been sitting in there for at least 6 months. When I changed the main valves I noticed some water dripping around the two parallel pumps for the fresh water system and traced the leak to a cracked plastic filter cover (see the picture below), and have added that to my list of items to purchase. I made a temporary fix with some Saran Wrap inside the strainer cap; if I were at sea I would have put some epoxy on the strainer insides (I don’t know if cured epoxy is food-safe, though) but this is just to minimize leaking until I get replacement parts. One really does need to keep up on maintenance and not postpone fixes on boats otherwise things just add up and one gets surprised at the wrong time.
I managed to get going a bit earlier today and did a dive at Turtle Reef before noon. There were no dive boats there and when I dinghied out I thought that some boat had taken away the mooring marker since, despite calmer seas, I couldn’t see anything at all on the surface. I kept on going away from land and was sure that I was far past the correct position when, still far ahead, I saw the black mooring air-filled oil container and thought it might be drifting offshore in the current but headed out there anyway. It was, in fact, still firmly attached to the bottom and it reminded me of how difficult distances can be to measure when there are no easy referents handy. This time I noted that I could see around the corner to the beach at Friar’s Bay and will remember that next time I head out. Although the seas were calmer and I was hoping for clear visibility, the was still a significant groundswell at depth (well, if 30 feet can be called “depth” for diving) but visibility was better than on the previous dives. While I didn’t see any turtles this time, I did find a Moray Eel which was being cleaned by a shrimp and otherwise had a fun dive.
Back aboard I cleaned the gear and read my camera book for a bit, but when happy hour came along I was shocked to discover that I had no Presidente left in the fridge and, at almost the same time, I heard the Rock & Roll band fire up at Zen It so put camera and notebook into my backpack and headed ashore. The only seat available was at a table close to the corner where the band had set up and the sound volume was such that I knew I couldn’t concentrate enough to type on the keyboard so I listened to 2 sets and at the third break quickly connected to the internet and was finished before the band began again. Instead of dinner elsewhere I had two of their Tapas (a Tapenade and Mozzarella sticks) which was sufficient for me.
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