Roosevelt Roads
Puerto Rico
18.14.018N
65.37.582W

This morning, we gingerly worked our way through the maze that our boat has become with the salon torn to pieces to check on the hot water tank. The second repair is still not holding. Somehow I already knew what the prognosis was going to be. I’m not sure I would have trusted it even if it had worked. So I dug out all of our mail order catalogs and started researching cost and shipping expenditures. We’ll rent a car tomorrow to do some leg work at the local chandleries as well. (His trip to West Marine yesterday wasn’t very fruitful. They had a hot water tank but from a different vender which would require re-plumbing all of the hoses.)

Since we’re going shopping, we might as well get everything else while we’re out and about. So I hoisted Dale up the mast to check on rigging the spinnaker halyard that broke. First we needed to locate the current one and then see if something had cut it while the cruising chute was deployed. Normally this is something that I would do since Dale’s not one for looking down from high places. But after convincing him that no matter what I found, he was ultimately the one who would have to tell me how to go about doing what ever had to be done, he agreed that this time he would go up. He did great! He even fixed the wind index that would hang up every once in a while since our transit from Martinique. He took a camera up with him to take pictures of everything so now we’ll both know just exactly what the other is talking about in the future. Jordan came by just in time to help tail the line when I let him back down again.

What we learned was that the spinnaker halyard looked to have simply worn out; there didn’t appear to be anything that would cut it. (Good thing it wore out on the chute instead of one of us). So we’ll add a new halyard to our shopping list. We also know that there is nothing we can do to add a pulley at the top of the mast that would made a difference with the cruising chute (an option that we had discussed). Dale fixed the wind index, so we’ve taken that off our list.

Since the boat looks like a bomb has gone off inside it anyway, I took the opportunity to dig out our “up and over” Christmas lights and rearrange one of our storage lockers in the back.
By night fall, we were decked out for the holidays. There are lights going up the roller furling and down the back. We have bells on the bow, a tree on the back deck, as well as another in the salon on the only clear space available. We’re the only Christmas lights for miles. The boat’s a mess but I’m happy.