So here I sit, our last day aboard before the great return home and the long wait until our next visit (about 4 weeks).
Missing this already!
Over the last few days we have tried to empty and locate a leak into the starboard bilge. Barry and Rauen both tasted the water and concluded it was fresh. Barry then slowly inspected both the hot and cold water pipes that run in this bilge and up to our bathroom. He discovered the pipe had a slow leak at the point where it attached to the coldwater tap on our basin. He found the spanners to tighten it up and I held the one side in place while he turned it tighter...viola. How do we know it worked?
Well we put on the water pump. Previously when the water pump was on, every 5 minutes or so we would hear it labour, we thought nothing of it, but we made sure it was always turned off to ensure low power consumption. Now in hindsight we realised that whenever it laboured I was building up the pressure in the system as the existing water had leaked out via our basin tap. So we know the leak has stopped because the pump does not labour while no taps are turned on.
Will this solve our wet starboard bilge problem? We will wait and watch and see. We have dried the bilge 3 times this week, removing about 150 litres of water in the process. Hopefully we will have a dry bilge on our return in 4 weeks time or we will be back to the drawing board, fresh water is not something we want to loose.
We also took a great walk, playing soccer on the way and visited the beach for a quick dip in the salt water. As Rauen put it: “I have to tell my friends I came to the ocean for 5 weeks but I never swam or went to the beach even once?” Who could argue with that?
Today is what we like to call snack day…the day we all eat everything that is perishable on board so that nothing is off when we get back. I cook the last of the eggs, the last viennas in the fridge, any meat I have taken out to defrost but is yet uncooked, we slice up the cheese, butter the last slices of bread, take out the final apples and last few naartjies and generally enjoy a eat your favourite treats day while we pack and get ourselves ready to leave. I’m off to cook up a storm before I start my packing expedition.
