Today was a day of work. There was no glamour, no time out, just "put your head down and go".

We did get a lot accomplished.

My day was a below decks day, with electrical and engine work my focus. I had to re-wire the replacement-for-failed-unit regulator. I think that it's done and done correctly. I had to re-wire the replacement-for-failed-unit starter and solenoid, too. I did get the rest of the engine work figured out so that we can move when the opportunity appears, hopefully tomorrow. I need a piece of stainless steel tube fabricated and I need help for that.

Conni did yeoman's duty outside today, working on the leaking chainplates all day in the very hot sun. She has sunburn to prove it! With some luck, she's got the pesky leak plugged with the massive amount of caulk that she applied. What can't she do?

We started the day by lubricating the sea cocks. Boats need holes through their holes: we need saltwater for engine cooling and cleaning the toilets during flushing, for example, and we also evacuate various effluent and warm cooling water. Normally, the holes are filled with a metal or nylon mushroom shape called, appropriately enough, a "through-hull". Fitted to all good through-hulls is a valve so that the hole can be closed off when not in use or during an emergency. These valves are called "sea cocks" for reasons lost in history. At any rate, this maintenance is often overlooked but at a sailors' peril. Imagine that a hose connecting a sea cock to the toilet (or "head" as they're called on a boat) breaks. Yikes! It would be nice to just rotate a handle and stop the incoming water, wouldn't it? If the sea cock is frozen open, you're in big trouble. As always, simple maintenance is the solution. I manipulated the sea cocks, Conni applied the special lubricant. The yard was noisy with grinders, so we communicated with our little radios. All in all, a useful practice.

By Friday, I've got to have the engine going, so that's my entire focus for the next few days. We'll hank on sails, inflate the dinghy, install our new anchor, after we're launched. We still have to check the Ham radio and the desalinator, too. There's fuel, both gasoline and diesel, to store, and groceries to buy and store. Our forward-looking sonar has a broken cable, too, so at some point, I have to try and splice it. We're trying to prioritize our tasks, but sometimes everything seems important. We have to have many details of work completed before we're safe to sail in the Pacific.

Here's The Plan: We will try to launch (or "splash") the boat on Friday. We hope to stay at their single dock for a day or so, to ease our remaining work. If we can do that, we'll move aboard on Friday morning, leaving our pension, as they call these small bungalows, and become cruisers again. We'll tour Taha'a, the other island within the same reef, for a few days, then come back to Raiatea. We'll sail to Tahiti in an overnight sail and stay at the Marina Taina in Papeete. We were there a week on our entrance to Tahiti. Our crew, Nathan Zeigler, will arrive next Saturday morning. We'll rent a car to buy and haul groceries, to fetch Nathan, to tour Tahiti a bit, and to fetch our new Mercury outboard.

That's the plan, anyway.

So, that's it so far. After some searching around, we did finally find our replacement-for-failed-unit whisker pole that the Carenage had temporarily misplaced. West Marine sent us a brand new one at their expense (shipping alone was US$800!) and we wanted to be able to use it. You all know the sad story about the damaged whisker pole, I'm sure.

We're staying at the Raiatea Carenage. In the days of sailing ships, marine growth was not as easily controlled as today. Even with copper-clad bottoms, growth made significant reductions in speed, and they were already slow. There were also legitimate reasons to do hull repair: damage from battle being an important one. Often, without dry docks, sailors would sail their boats into shallow water at high tide, allow the boats to ground during low tide, and have dry hull to work on. This was called "careening" a ship, and the name of the yard is from that old phrase. i think that it's a very neat name.