Rock Sound - Into Thin Air

The water was like glass this morning so Kevin decided to climb the mast to see if there was anything we could do to fix the windex (wind speed/direction indicator). "Climbing" the mast actually doesn't involve much climbing, it's really more like I hoist Kevin like a sail. He put on a climbing harness and we attached the main halyard (rope that hoists the mainsail) to the harness. As a precaution he also clipped on a second rope (our spare halyard) just to have a backup. Then I used the electric winch to hoist him slowly up the mast, which stands 60 feet off the water. We used our talkabouts to communicate so that no one had to shout up and down. Last spring when I went up the mast to grease the mainsail track, we were so nervous about it that we didn't take any photos. This time, we were smarter and both of us had cameras. Kevin got some great bird-eye shots of the boat, which we'll post when we get an internet connection. He took a look at the windex and wasn't able to find anything obviously wrong with it. But he did find something else: a sharp edge on our glomex antenna (tv antenna) that keeps chafing the halyard. When we were getting ready to hoist him we discovered that the halyard had chafed halfway through at the end of the line where it attaches to the sail. Not good. So he covered the sharp edge with duct tape and hopefully that solves our chafe problem. As for the windex, we will keep an eye on it and see if the problem worsens.

The rest of our day was spent taking full advantage of the capacity of our watermaker. The watermaker is great! We fired up the diesel generator did two loads of laundry (17 gallons each) and both took showers (5 gallons each). Meanwhile we ran the watermaker on high power (producing 9.5 gallons/hr) for 4.5 hours, then on low power (6 gallons/hr) for 2 hours. In addition, we were running a 15 gallon deficit from yesterday when we didn't run the watermaker. Wow, I just realized that I wrote a math "story problem" just now. Okay class, can you tell me if we were able to refill our water tank? Show your work.