Aboard Dignity (Lagoon 420) Blog

We still don’t have our shipment. The receivers on the island now insist on an original bill of lading which we don’t have. We have been sent a pdf which we have forwarded and printed/handed over but this does not suffice. We have been onto the shipping company to provide communications to authorize release. They say they have done this but the locals say they have not received this authority. Today is a public holiday in St Maarten so nothing will progress today bar pushing the folks in the US to send clearer / repeat communications.

Meanwhile we are making progress on little things on the boat. I’ve put teflon gel on a number of screws on the boat where you have metal against metal to prevent galvanic corrosion. We have sweetened the bilges with some bilge soap. We have put salad oil in the heads (toilets) – an instant way to eliminate squeaking. I’ve also installed better rated fire extinguishers so the boat conforms to US Coast Guard regs.

So today we are forced to accept the pace of the islands and finish our books, read some manuals, etc.

The last 24 hours saw us slow down considerably – something we’ve needed to do for some time. Helen had re caulked the surround to the sinks so we wished to avoid using the kitchen area. We went ashore and ate at the local shore side food area. Helen had fish and rice while I had chicken curry on rice. We ended up chatting to a chap from Oregon who fished commercially out of Alaska. He was down here on vacation. At this time of year the weather is somewhat different here than it is in Alaska.

This morning Eddie dropped off his vacuum cleaner (ours is somerwhere) so we cleaned up all the dust from the recent work. Later in the morning we climbed up to Fort Louis and took picks of the bay. In the afternoon, once it had cooled down we went for a walk on what we hoped would be a mountain trail. After following many animals trails we found our way back to the main road and decided to negotiate a barbed wire fence rather than continue looking for a proper way out. That’s about it. Rest of the day been chillin’. This blog will probably not be sent on Monday as the internet has been down all day. Not just here but all around I hear.

Shortly after 3pm today our watermaker produced it’s first fresh water. The leaks have been fixed and almost everything connected up. In all honestly it’s pretty tasteless as it is very close to distilled water. However, the thought that it is our own home made water and that it certainly doesn’t taste like the chlorinated water we picked up from Nanny Cay permits it to be called delicious.

For now we have drunk our fill and filled up a spare bottle. In theory we could now go wild and drain our tanks and refill with fresh water. However, the energy for this will come from the batteries which can only be replenished from diesel right now. So we’ll continue to run the water maker just to fill our bottles until we have the solar panels installed or we run out of on board water.

The job isn’t entirely complete. The control panel still needs to be mounted and we need to install the cross line to the port tank. We are going to first try a gravity based distribution system. The watermaker is set up (although not currently connected) to feed into to the overflow pipe from the starboard water tank. This allows water to spill out when overfilling from the deck (or the watermaker). The height of the vent is higher than the highest point a cross connection would have to go so when the starboard water tank is full, rather than venting off, the fresh water should flow to the other side of the boat and feed the port tank. We’ll see. The alternative is a valve but we’ll try to avoid that.

On the positive side we’ve also sealed the probable source of the earlier found leak. In a days time some more testing will be performed.

On the down side I’ve lost a couple of features on my digital camera. The first feature I discovered not to work was the fact that it is supposed to be waterproof down to 30 feet. I had gone under the boat to take pics of the through hulls. The second feature to shutdown was the display. It still take pics but without a viewfinder it’s all point and hope. And there’s no way to change settings unless I push buttons and work from memory. Maybe it’ll self right when dried out.

For now, just a few extra pics of the installed water maker and our first cup.