I realized last night, while delving into the dark,and murky depths of my fridge looking for edibles, that I haven’t defrosted the plates since coming aboard and that this might be exacerbating my power consumption problems aboard. So this morning I turned off my fridge and freezer power, put the contents of the freezer into cold storage bags and the fridge contents into the sinks to prevent them from gaining too much heat while I defrosted and cleaned the insides of both cold chambers.
While waiting for the defrosting process to complete I headed outside to help a small sailboat enter the lagoon and go to the docks, only to find that this time there were 4 dinghies there to assist, including Mark in his lil Dink. We got the boat to the docks, but the dock master said that they wouldn’t allow an engine less boat to be towed inside. This despite them insisting that they’d spoken with the dock on the VHF earlier. We helped them grab a mooring in the lagoon while they cleared up the situation. Mark and I grabbed a coffee and I returned to my defrosting process, which is about as interesting as watching grass grow or paint dry, but luckily a lot faster in these tropical climes.
We were treated to a bit of “Hafenkino” (Hafen=Harbour, Kino=Theater) when the mega yacht Mariu attempted to lift their anchor while departing from the Palapa marina, it wouldn’t come up off the bottom and after a lot of shouting, gesticulation and attempts to jerk the anchor free it seems that they dropped their chain so that they could make it to the the outbound bridge opening in time. I’m certain that the chain and anchor aren’t going anywhere before they return.
The fridge and freezer are chugging away right now and cooling things down again, hopefully the lack of a couple of inches of ice and rime from the evaporation plates is going to keep the energy consumption. While waiting for the bimini to get returned I finally approached the task of fixing a slight leak on the aft toilet, which I’d been postponing in the hopes that the problem would somehow magically go away. Since the problem remained I got my tools and cleaning gear and started the disassembly process. As luck would have it, I managed to pierce my finger with a loose dentist’s pick that was lying the toolbox and worked with a little plastic baggie part tied around my finger (over the bandage) so that there was no chance of infection. After cleaning up and removing the macerator pump everything looked to be in perfect order, but I did clean up inside and put some lanolin on the O-ring to make a better seal. When I put the assembly back together again it was still leaking, so I’ll have to get the service kit from Jabsco which includes their specially sized O-ring.
I enjoyed a pre-prandial happy hour drink at the bridge with Marie, Andy and Mark and then headed back to the boat for dinner. I realized that I needed some fresh items in order to cook, so continued on to the supermarket which meant that I tied up at Barnacle’s. They were playing a Peter Gabriel concert DVD on their screen, so rather than go shopping I ended up watching that concert and having a meal there.
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