Captain’s Journal:

So why not go on a real voyage? Bad idea for us anyway, at this moment.  The boat’s not ready is the best reason and what we hear from the sailors we keep up with via Youtube and blogs they’re mostly stuck in place all over the world.  So you can leave a harbor but you can’t enter one if you’re changing countries, sometimes even within the same country.  

One couple whose sailing journey we follow flew back to the US just before this all ramped up to the heights we’re seeing now and had a hell of a time getting back to their boat in Panama.  Then there’s the thought, what if one of us contracts the Coronavirus?  Do ya really want to be somewhere else for treatment is the thought there.  But mainly we’re not ready to shove off for any extended time.

Oatmeal and procrastination and the afternoon finds me under the galley sink again chipping away at the sump project.  There’s twisting and grunting and some amount of force to get the hose to cooperate and mate up with the vented loop in just the right awkward position. 

But that turns out to be the easy part. And something that has nothing to do with the through hull for the sink drain that I just noticed has caused a small stream of wet glistening a trail down the hull.  What the …?, that wasn’t like that when I started this.  Hoping but doubting it was a loose hose clamp, I crank on the lowest one only to increase the velocity of the little stream. Well grrrrrrr.

I won’t drag you through the next two plus hours of battle and the makeshift fix I managed.  The virus has sent my boat supply store people home to huddle in place so this is when the potpourri of spare this and that you’ve been hanging on to forever counts. 

I always wanted to be that go over to the inventory clipboard guy. The mythical one that flips a few alphabetically arranged pages and finds his spare inch and a half NPT pipe to hose fittings that’s in locker number three beside the rigging spares.

It just hasn’t happened yet.  Well once, for a little while in the mid eighties when all this being aboard was new and I wore a younger man’s clothes.  Ha, I always wanted a reason to say that line out loud somewhere. 

I’ll summarize the incident.  Someone somewhere in the long ago history of Colony II decided it was a good idea to put a stainless steel pipe to hose fitting in a bronze thru-hull.  Dissimilar metals in salt water don’t play well together–amazing it lasted this long. 

So sunset in the cockpit discussing the Nowhere Voyage so far with the Admiral found me waffling between being ticked at having to spend most of today’s work time on the pop up problem and grateful that I leaned against it and found it.  Better here during the Nowhere Voyage than three hundred miles offshore on a somewhere trip.  The shower sump got back on the list. A problem with head pressure, sigh, and dark time has arrived. 

I think some warm grub, a touch of update on the Coronavirus news and maybe a binge watch on the Picard series will cap us off nicely tonight.