We spent the day getting ready to cross the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. I made a pasta salad that I like to eat underway. It’s just ham, carrots, celery and mayo. Bland for your stomach, but a meal all in one. I also tucked away loose ends in the galley. That involved cleaning out the refrigerator, too.
I washed out the microfiber clothes that we used yesterday. I’m really searching for what I did today.
Dave took the motor off of the dinghy and remounted it on the stern on his newly reinforced motor mount. I help by lifting the motor using a winch as Dave directs it into place. He ran the rest of the gasoline out of the motor and flushed everything with fresh water after it was mounted. Then he tied the dinghy onto the davits and lashed it tight to keep it from swinging. Dave called the owner of Ocean Marine Systems Davits out of Canada to see what our davits could take. He said it can handle the weight even with the motor on the dinghy. But you need to lash it tight to stop any sudden jerks. With the wave action, we don’t like the weight swinging on the davits. So we take the motor off. If we drag the dinghy behind, it slows us down. We just have to be ready to cut it free in an emergency. A captain told us early on that if you need your dinghy as a lifeboat, you won’t have enough fuel to get you to a shore, so you may as well not have the motor on the dinghy. That’s a reality check.
Dave cleaned up all of the utensils he used yesterday cleaning the hull and put everything away. He really likes a wire brush similar to a large pipe cleaner to get into the through hulls. He picked this up through Sailor’s Solutions. He has been happy with the products they carry, especially our Hooknife for emergency cutting of lines, our Smart Lock that goes on our outboard motor, and or LED cockpit light. He cleaned the raw water screen for the generator before running it again today to finish making water. We had stopped yesterday before our tank was full because we wanted to leave and visit our friends.
Dave ran a hand line inside our boat from the mast at the forward part of our saloon back to the handles on our companion way. Our Beneteau 423 has a nice spacious salon/saloon area that gives the boat an open feeling when below. But in rough water, there is a lot more space to bounce off of the walls. So running a line gives you a nice hand hold when moving around inside the boat at sea.
We checked the bilge and didn’t find any water, so we’re pretty confident we found the small leak from the water maker.
All day we continued to check several weather sources. And after pulling everything together, we decided not to leave tonight. Our main source, Chris Parker, was predicting squalls up to 30 knots. And the radar showed lots of nasty activity off shore between Fl and the Bahamas. And one of our newer weather sources has alerts for the area and one of them was waterspouts off shore directly east of us. Those are similar to tornados on the water. That kind of sealed the deal for me. So now we are looking at Tuesday the 12th, but we’ll see what happens in the meantime.
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