The Pacific: 03.41 N 79.57 W

The wind seems to be calming down a bit and, what is most important, it slightly changed its direction (or it seems so to us). That’s why we turned westwards this morning. So keep drinking our tail wind. It seems to work gradually.

Having turned, we started examining the losses after the two-day rocking. We detected them at once and got very disappointed. Really disappointed. From a pocket astern, a glass with our toothbrushes and tooth paste was washed away. Ha-ha-ha. You think it’s funny and not a problem at all. Yet, we don’t know for how long we’ll have our teeth not brushed. At that moment we wanted badly to brush our teeth as during these two days there was no time for it. We started discussing a future purchase of a tooth paste as everything is expensive on the islands. We decided that if it costs less than 10 bucks, we’ll be able to afford it, if not – we’ll brush them with sand.

We spent the second half of the day removing the water. Did I tell you how scared we got when we discovered at night during the rough weather that water was coming in? Then imagine… night, pitch dark, the wind’s howling, it’s shaking as if in a mixer, the wave crests are flying over the yacht and we realize that there is ankle-deep water on the floor. Half awake and frightened, we almost peed our pants simultaneously in terror. The only thing that stopped us was that it would only raise the water level even higher. Swearing, we grasped a bucket, Lena started collecting water downstairs. I then took this bucket through the hatch and poured it overboard. In half an hour, we realized that water kept rising. Lena had no time to think while collecting water. I started thinking in-between taking out the bucket. This only made the situation more terrifying for I couldn’t grasp where the water came from, there were too many options, starting from the sanitary engineering and ending with a hole in the hull. The only thing that calmed me down was that we didn’t hear anything like a crash. Another half-hour of silent desperation but, notwithstanding all our endeavors, the water level got higher. Lena saved us as usual. As it turned out, not only was she collecting the water but also analyzing its possible source, shutting off the compartments and watching where they are filled from, left or right. According to her, it appeared that it was flooding from somewhere around the cooker. Then it was my turn to tackle the problem and everything turned out as simple as it usually is. The matter is that in Panama we had the cooker repaired and it was naturally lifted from its place and we have the cooker as one unit with a sink. And one of the hoses just didn’t fit in its proper place under the installation and came off during the rocking. And a hose that jumps off, as many of you probably know, is a jet of water as thick as a finger. The only difference is that when this happens in your kitchen at home you’ll have to pay for repairs to be done by your neighbors from downstairs and in the middle of the Pacific it’s really scary.

Having written three letters in three days, I realized that it’s actually quite funny. And what inspired me was that, as usual, every cloud had its silver lining. Remember a story when they started charging us fees for the satellite phone? The problem was solved by Dmitry Zakharov, Satellite Telecom’s Director. He just paid our fees himself. MANY THANKS TO HIM!!! So now, thanks to Dmitry, we have not only a 24×7 communication means, but also some Internet traffic (that sort of sweetened the pill of including fees in the new tariff). And it’s a sin not use traffic when it’s available. So let’s thank him once again altogether.

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