Windy easing up, Fixing leaks
17 January 2018 | East of New Zealand
Alan/low grey cloud cover
Listening to Carolina Chocolate Drops for breakfast. But just coffee so far. Maybe pancakes later. Janneke is slowly getting better. It's kinda weird because for her reading relieves her sickness!
Outside it is a little dreary grey: drizzle, low cloud cover, but wind is a gentle 13 knots which is a nice change. Still going upwind though! The temperature has dropped but it is still warm enough (17C) We're still going North of East. Met Bob sent me an update last night that has me going east on starboard tack for another couple days and then slowly curve south but I am wondering if I don't want to escape south on the other tack. That will mean foregoing some easting for a couple days but it would guarantee that I would dip under the subtropical ridge(high) and I think increase my chances of getting fully in the westerlies. Staying north is probably a little faster but only if the high behaves as predicted, which seems a little risky to me. I'll get gribs from Maxsea and decide later this a.m.
These several days of slugging upwind in strong winds and seas has revealed tiny leaks here and there on deck that I addressed yesterday by putting 5200 on the lips of three hatches and closing them up for good! I found that of these tiny drips comes either from the vent in our cabin or one of the side hatches; then it travels down the wood trim and falls a drop every once in a while on the corner of the radio, inside the cabinet. It is really a small amount but that is what corroded the radio and eventually fucked it up! The leak is not big enough usually to notice it but this time I saw the bitch in action. Of course the work in Opua didn't fix my Nemesis leak in the chain locker because yesterday I sponged out of the bilge a couple buckets of that delicious diesel/salt water mixture which when squeezed out in the bucket looks and feel like woolly mammoth diarrhea but of course smells far worse. The upside was that the diesel cleaned my hand of the 5200 from the earlier job (so yes: thank the f@#$$$* gods for small favors!
I got to get to that watermaker but as long as I don't deal with it the possibility exists that I will be able to fix it whereas if I attack the problem now I have both to work and be faced with the fact that the problem is not fixable on board! So it seems to me that the lazy approach of putting off the work is much smarter since my chances of fixing the problem remain non-zero: this is impeccable logic!