Today was a bit of a maintenance day. I started the morning off with defrosting both the fridge and the freezer. The former takes a lot longer since I can use the hot water from the sink to wash the ice away in the freezer but the fridge isn’t reachable that way. I put the contents of the fridge into insulated bags along with some 2l bottles of frozen water from the freezer and then opened the fridge as much as possible. Once the ice around the freezer compartment had melted enough to let me open the door the process sped up, since I could mop up the cold meltwater and remove any loosened chunks of ice quickly. My fingers froze but I got the job expedited and soon had a clean, dry and ice-free fridge to restock. I repeated my bagging procedure for the freezer contents but that was hardly necessary as I got the unit cleaned up and dried within minutes. I believe that both units are now as energy-efficient as they can be – at least until the ice gets too thick again. I might try just turning the fridge off long enough to melt any accumulated ice in frequent intervals in the future (but I’ll have to remember to remove the drain plug at the bottom before doing so.
In a fit of energy, I took my implements of destruction (a bucket, Scotch Pad, Pine-Sol, paint scraper and a pair of pliers) on the dinghy and headed to a small sandy beach on Prickly Pear named “Honeymoon Beach” and put it to use as a cleaning station for the bottom of my dinghy. Much of the growth had been removed by the long passages and frequent sailing, but enough remained to form what biologists might term a biotope and I wanted a pristine landscape down there without any features and no place for flora or fauna to call home. First the inside of the dinghy was cleaned with some water and Pine-Sol, then the dinghy was flipped over to let me scrape off the hard stuff with the paint scraper and then I used wet sand and the Scotch pad repeatedly to get rid of the green stuff.
Tonight was a full moon and I spent it aboard but got a great view of the moon rising over Prickly Pear. As the night was clear and nearly cloudless I pulled out my little tablet with the star chart application so I could find and identify the planets (especially the one hovering close to the moon, which turned out to be Jupiter) but I couldn’t get the darned thing to track and I believe that the internal sensors had shut down to low power mode, so I’ll have to charge up the tablet and test it during daylight hours.
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