Sunday, May 27. I slept until 9:30 and Deb, 10:30, but finally felt less sleep deprived. The day was overcast and windy with squalls. Now a real rainy day I wouldn't mind. It would fill our water tanks. But this was mostly wind with enough rain to be obnoxious, but not to fill tanks. So, I attacked the watermaker. Just removing the ETD (the “heart” of the watermaker and the part that fails) is a major undertaking as we bought the “compact” model with everything mounted in an aluminum enclosure. Once the ETD is removed, there are two 'repairs' that are sort of like routine maintenance every 500 hours, except ours has not seen nearly that service. When I disassembled it to do the service, I found that one of the pieces was missing a tiny spring (sort of like the kind in a ball point pen only smaller). The idiots at Yacht Services obviously assembled it wrong! There was some rust in the chamber and the shaft was stained with rust so maybe the spring was there, but NOT stainless and obviously without the plastic cap that held it in place as that was nowhere to be seen and would not have disappeared. Fortunately I had a spare of that part from previous repair and it had both springs intact. Unfortunately doing the repair did not solve the problem. It appears that I will have to have the ETD rebuilt again to the tune of another $1000. I will email the company, but I am seriously thinking of just replacing it with a different brand. This is ridiculous. We use it for 3 months and it fails. As I was reinstalling the ETD to test it, Orville came by and said his friend would meet me at the dinghy dock @ 4:00 to fix my outboard. Except that at 4:00 it was raining fairly steadily and he didn't show up. I finally got Orville's phone number, got Aurelio's phone number from him, and have a date for tomorrow. Then it started with the lightening. It was all around us. Heavy crashes with thunder (none of that dry lightening). We unplugged everything, put the computer and handheld gps in the oven, and made sure the mast ground was in the water (it was). Lots of wind, not much rain, lots of lightening – for about 2 hours, then the lightening let up and we just had rain and wind into the evening. Deb had made a delicious beef stew which was just right for such a night. Just another shitty day in paradise.