Out of the gentle pitter-patter of our nightly rain on Escape Velocity’s decks right above my head, a subtle change must have registered subconsciously while I read. Yes… as I recall the breeze began to freshen and the rain was more of an insistent tattoo. The next thing I remember is an impossibly loud bang or rather an awesomely loud boom or maybe it was more of an incredibly close crack…no, maybe more of a crack simultaneously morphing into a boom. Yes, let’s agree to call it a Cracoom. As we both headed out to the cockpit, banging into each other like the three stooges at the companionway door, the Escape Velocity mantra rang out, “What was that?!” EV seemed to be bobbing straight up and down as though she’d been briefly lifted up like a rubber ducky and let go. A deluge of biblical proportions was already in progress. The sky was lit up with so many overlapping lightning strikes forking all around us that it looked like a “strobie” kind of daylight. This must be how it feels to be Brangelina at the Oscars.
We began to pour our five-gallon trugs of rain water into the main tank filter but as soon as we had one empty the other was overflowing. The rain went on for hours but in minutes we had no more storage left and had to watch it run off the side decks.
So the answer to the question of “when is it good to have no mast?” is when you find yourself in a particularly nasty electrical storm.
On the admin side of things progress is being made, orders are being ordered or at least firmed-up and we’re still very happy with our insurance company. On the other hand Robert, our crusty but benign Hungarian mechanic has found a way to come up with an alternator that won’t fit in the space that Volvo has allotted for said alternator. It was hard to tell but I think he was even more morose than when we first met him but at least the generator has been rebuilt however the electrical end is sitting on the saloon floor awaiting…I don’t know, a better mood or something. The generating end is sporting, at Roberts suggestion, a new pristine white paint job @ 25,279.98 colons (fifty USD) but I still feel it would look better installed in the generator up in the forward locker.
Mañana doesn’t mean tomorrow, it just means not today.
