Back Together again

Back Together again   …   Wednesday 19th Dec 2012

I'm back! It was a very good trip to the UK - great to see my family, although my mum's health wasn't as good as I'd hoped and is still a concern. I arrived back on Monday evening and spent the night at Paul and Fran's house, returning to the boat yesterday. Then it was a very early start this morning (4am) to pick Tash up at the airport. I'm really happy to be back on the boat and even happier to be back together again as a family for a couple of weeks. Gloria and I spent the day doing some shopping and jobs whilst Tash tried to catch up on some sleep. Yesterday we had succeeded in getting the water maker (de-salinator) working. It turned out to be surprisingly easy and it appears to be in working fine. However, we weren't able to figure out the flushing mechanism and in fact wanted to return the system to its "pickled" state so we wouldn't need to keep running it until we get to the Bahamas. Today we bought some extra hosing so we could simply flush with fresh water (non-chlorinated) collected from the system and then anti-freeze to "pickle" it. This went well and we feel fairly confident about being able to bring the system on line when needed.

This evening Paul and Fran came round and we ate "Shrimp and Grits" which I've been keen to cook for a while and it turned out pretty good. For dessert we got to enjoy the cookies that Grant and Traci sent down to us. Thanks very much - they are totally excellent! The chocolate coconut macaroons were fantastic, and Paul said the ginger snaps were outstanding - so I'll look forward to tasting them tomorrow.

Overall things going very well - we (mostly Gloria in my absence) have done many of the jobs we needed to do. The biggest challenge at the minute are the bloody "no-see-ums" which are very irritating - literally and metaphorically. Desperately need to sleep now. 

Mike