This is our second night in Pension Tiare Nui and, holy smokes is it nice! Air conditioned room, hot shower, room to spread and sort our stuff: I know that it's a low bar, but when one works all day in humid heat, it's a miracle to suddenly be clean and cool and stay that way all night.

Conni went up the mast today and removed the Windex (a purely mechanical wind direction indicator) and our electronic wind sensor. They don't need to be in the wind and sun for so many months so we remove them at the end of each season. She can also check nuts and bolts on her way up and down the mast. Several years ago, she discovered that our radar mount was loose so the i could get it fixed before a catastrophe.

Both main and jib are down and stowed. The same with our dinghy, although Madame Faux, our wonderful sail maker, is fabricating a dinghy storage bag for us out of material that we bought and brought with us. We hope that the bag provides sun and rain protection during the hot season as the bags do that she made for our two sails.

Conni's remaining big on-deck chore is to modify our mast boot system so it doesn't leak like a sieve. She got some hints and suggestions from a good rigger in Marina Taina and we both hope for the best. At the least, the bilge pump works on automatic, so if we continue to get leaks, we can rid the boat of the water.

We got the Honda generator prepared for storage, and the Mercury outboard, too: two big tasks for me. All in all, we had a successful day.

Wednesday, we continued our work on decommissioning the boat. Now that the big items are done, things move more slowly. Conni worked on various on-deck chores and helped me with "summer-izing" our new engine. It didn't go smoothly since it was our first time, but we're done. It did take several hours of Conni's time, though, and we depart the island on Tuesday morning. Yikes!

We fetch our newly-made dinghy bag tomorrow and Conni works on the mast leak and scrubs the hull at waterline. I've got some fabrication chores to do since the engine installation changed a lot of structures in the boat and we're not sure we'll remember to make the changes next year.