It was raining cats and dogs yesterday- not just as squalls passed over, but more or less continuously for the whole day. This gave me plenty of practice in collecting fresh water. We’ve experimented with a couple of different techniques and the favoured one is to allow the first ten minutes of the downpour to clean the boat, then ‘harvest’ the fresh water with a simple hand pump as it flows along the side decks. I collected about 220 litres in the morning, filling both the forward and aft tanks.
The wind was gusting to the mid twenties during the more intense squalls, so I didn’t want to leave the boat. Also, I love being on board when it rains, with it pounding down on the hatches in the ceiling. I think living in the Middle East gives you a special appreciation of the rain, when it does fall.
I could only procrastinate for so long by watching Nicole Kidman in the DVD “To Die For” (not bad, not her best work...) on the laptop, updating my dive log, and having a midday snooze... and then I couldn’t put it off any longer.
Yup, it was time for the engine service. I’ve never really had too much to do with engines. When my older cousins resurrected my dead go kart when I was a kid, I thought that they were more akin to magicians rather than simply knowing something about engines.
Over the last two and a half years of boat ownership, I’ve done more and more of the maintenance and chores myself. It pays to be self sufficient when the nearest authorised Volvo Penta service agent is many hundreds of miles away.
I am mighty proud of myself that I changed the oil, oil filter and fuel filter, the first time I’ve done each of them. I find a lot of these chores quite straight forward once you go through the motions the first time. I know that next time it’ll take me about a third of the time to complete.
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