Cracoom

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.

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One Response to Cracoom

  1. Jack and Marce,
    Glad you have full tanks of fresh sweet rainwater!
    It was just such an event around 5pm on a June evening in 2010 when we were anchored next to Melbourne, Florida. It did not hit us, somewhere away from us but close. We thought we had dodged a bullet, till the next morning at 10am when we started out, and the chart plotter autopilot was not acting right and we assumed some ground had come loose on the wiring somewhere. We went up the inside of the ICW to Southern Georgia without the Chartplotter working just right. Finally our trustworthy wiring guru… a long retired Navy Chief was able to see it to hopefully figure it out and put it all right. He asked after looking at everything, “Have you been near lightning lately?” We told him, “Wait a minute”, and that we did have a situation down in Melbourne last week. We ended up using our $3K deductible but ended up replacing the two chart plotters, radome and Tridata instruments and the SiriusXM weather receiver. We now cringe even reading your message. Good luck. Ed and Sue

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