I woke up very early, at 06:00 and the crack of dawn; but not quite voluntarily as someone drove a dinghy by with a big wake, which slapped loudly on the hull and woke me up. Since I was up already, I decided to make a coffee and start the day. After the morning network I ran the generator and used some of my last water to wash my shirts and do the dishes. When the dishwasher is filled it ends up using less water than I would when doing the dishes by hand, and it is finished in 25 minutes without me having to get my fingers dirty. The washing machine takes about 45 minutes to wash clothes, so in the 45 minutes of generator running I got all that done, plus made breakfast and charged the batteries. The charging was superfluous as I believe that the 5 solar panels I have now would have recharged the bank during the course of the day.
I finally got the BBQ taken apart, partially cleaned it and replaced the piezoelectric lighter as well as the heat reflection plate and will not let it get that dirty again (the old one didn’t reflect heat anymore and the heat I did use ended up corroding most the metal away. I’m still optimistic about getting my dodger back from the sail maker today; there’s a saying in German “Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt”. This is fitting considering my sail maker is indeed German. Mark e-mailed me from St. Barths and says that the “Bucket” race and atmosphere is great. If the dodger gets done in time I can put the boat back together and clear out in time to make it into St. Barths before dark. But since we are on island time, that is a very big “if”.
I finally ended up heading to the Sail Loft at 16:30, shortly before their closing time and found that they had finished, but just forgotten to tell me (as arranged). The bill was quite a bit higher than I’d expected, but I paid up and once back aboard Zanshin I started work on getting the dodger back up and to install the solar panels. The winds, which had been mild all day, piped up and that made getting the dodger back up quite a chore with flapping cloth whacking me about the face as I tried to get the zippers fastened. Although I had marked the panels on the dodger cloth and explained several times what I wanted, the job that was completed wasn’t quite what I’d asked for. The Velcro® flaps that go on top of the panels need to just cover the edges and cannot be too long as that would put the panels in shade. The flaps were stitched too close and I now the only solution without shading the outer cells is to have the cover looser than it should be. But now I’ve got 4 out of 6 solar panels permanently attached, and I’ll have the Sail Loft do the remaining 2 panels on Monday – hopefully with a bit more attention to detail and at a reasonable cost.
Although I put up the panels, I haven’t wired them up yet; I’ll do that tomorrow morning as I’m now freshly shaved and showered and dressed in clean clothes and am heading out to Barnacle’s for their tasty ribs.
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