The weather forecast for today consisted of two key components: (a) no wind, and (b) lots of rain. This rather dreary forecast had me delay my departure and I took a trip to the one open chandlery in the morning to pick up an activated charcoal filter for flushing out my watermaker membrane (the filter is only needed when there’s chlorine from city water in the tanks, and I’d filled my tanks from the dock water supply the day before and had not had a filter in place since I use the watermaker exclusively to get fresh water) and I did a quick trip to the local grocery store to get some provisions. The local store is rather small and not particularly well stocked, so when my neighbours from “Sweet Chariot” rented a car and asked I would like to accompany them on a provisioning trip to the large Carrefour in town I jumped at the opportunity. I shouldn’t have been so quick on the trigger, though – they’d warned me that it would take a while to complete shopping and although I enjoy provisioning it did take over an hour and a half in the store before we were ready to return to the marina. The car was filled to overflowing with our purchases and I was surprised that everything fit! While in the store we missed most of the huge deluge that came down, but we did see a number of seriously flooded streets on the return trip.
After stowing my purchases from the trip I worked on cleaning some of rust stains in the bilge (caused by metal fittings on the A/C system) and then worked on my Arduino project for the Cubigel fridge control system. I felt quite scruffy as I hadn’t shaved in a couple of days so I did that but using my razor was almost painful and I knew that my next task was to get out my whetstones and hone the razor(s). I used the opportunity to also sharpen 3 of my most frequently used kitchen knives and had the assistance of Madison from next door until she got bored and decided to use the water spray bottle on me rather than on the whetstone.
The weather remained a bit dreary all afternoon and the wind was nowhere to be found, so I was happy for once that I had a nice air-conditioned cabin to return to.
