17th November

12 00 N
61 46 W

Weather: showery, wind n/a, waves n/a

Another day of thumb twiddling and passing Gerry tools as requested. The day began with an examination of our salon clock which, as I said a couple of days ago, had stopped unexpectedly and we changed the batteries out with nothing apparently achieved - it hadn't started working overnight. So Gerry took it apart and sprayed all the important bits with contact cleaner and then put the new batteries back in - still nothing happening! So a more detailed examination got carried out - if you can seriously examine a 2.5 inch square box! Nothing seemed to be wrong, rusted or missing - it just decided that it didn't want to work any longer (I put the blame squarely on Covid as it seems to be the reason for every death this year - surely our clock must be included in the count?). Gerry gave up and put the face back into the casing and that's how it will stay - as the age old saying goes, it tells the correct time twice a day and for the rest of the time we have to guess! We have both come to realize just how often we check the time out on this clock and it is most annoying to have to now look elsewhere. The good thing is that we also have a weather station in the salon which has a digital clock so we can see the time with a glance to the port side of the cabin but it's just not the same we also have another clock in the nav station so we aren't without options! I said to Gerry that we need to change the time on the dead clock to read 5 o'clock then we can never be accused of drinking too early in the day! With the death of the clock established Gerry set about to see what damage he could cause to the electrical wiring for the new fridge and freezer components (if they ever arrive!) before he could do that though he had a bit more copper tubing to remove from the cockpit side of the engine which required him to squash back into his favourite lazarette in order to be able to chop the pipe into removal pieces and then pass them out to go into the trash bag. With the pipework now all completely removed it was the turn of the power wires, I went and hid waiting for the puff of smoke and the swearing to begin. Now Gerry is always very careful about power cables, I wish I could say the same for the previous owners of our boat as there are more MacGyvered joins in the wiring than one would believe possible so I kid you not when I say it took Gerry about 4 hours to disconnect it all and run the new cables to his satisfaction. There was no puff of smoke and all the things that should have stayed live did, including Gerry! Once the new cables were in place it was time to call it a day, have a cold bottle of bubbly in the cockpit and watch the sky darken, the sun didn't really set as there was too much cloud around and for the first time in a week we didn't see our turtle - obviously confused about the time of day as it was dark too early! It wasn't a very exciting day but at least we are almost ready for the new fridge stuff when it gets here from the moon.