After the obligatory morning network and my breakfast, I cleaned up a bit and decided to escape the confines of the lagoon with the 10:30 bridge. I weighed anchor and entered the channel behind a small U.S. flagged vessel and a big day sail catamaran was behind me. The small boat slowed down and stopped around the entrance to the Palapa dinghy dock and there wasn’t too much room to pass them. The bridge operator called them several times on the VHF, asking them at first politely and later on a bit more stridently to close up with rest of the pack and not remain so far behind. I shouted across to them if they were listening on the VHF and despite them saying “Yes” and my repeating the bridge operators request they just stated that there were still 5 minutes to go and wouldn’t move. The big catamaran behind me expressed his emotions better than I did by lifting both his hands up over his head and shaking his head. Then, when the bridge finally opened, the boat got in line and suddenly veered right before the bridge and did a 180° turn because a dinghy had crossed it’s intended path. What a messed up bridge opening. At least I found a spot in 15 feet of water to anchor off Kim Sha beach and am now rolling around a bit in the swell, to which I’m no longer accustomed after the long stay in the sheltered waters inside the lagoon.
I ran the watermaker for 3 hours to fill up one tank, I was running on fumes after the dirty waters inside the lagoon clogged my filters rather quickly. The sun was shining brightly and the solar panels were keeping up with the Spectra watermaker power consumption, even allowing about 1-2Amps extra. I worked on replacing the heating element for the boiler, it took a while to get access to the heating element insert and when I was finally ready to remove it I realized that it was recessed into the boiler just enough to make my locking pliers ineffective. The size is 54mm (2 1/8″) which is much bigger than any socket I have aboard. I will give it a try at Ace Hardware tomorrow but I don’t know if they carry anything that big. This means that I won’t have hot water unless I run my main engine until I finish that job.
I joined Mark at the SMYC for happy hour and then came back aboard Zanshin to make some dinner and read a book. The boat was rolling around quite a bit, even though the swell was quite low it came from a bad direction.
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