Yesterday, we woke up to dark gray skies and heavy rain. The combination of the ugly day and the inability to open the doors and windows made for yet another depressing day. It was also really cold out, meaning we needed long pants, sweaters and jackets. Louis had asked us for a statement for his insurance, so Christi spent the majority of the day doing laundry and writing the blog post for the volcano/emergency rescue and gave the post to Louis as our official statement of events. That was one long story and took pretty much all day to write.

Eric spent the day cleaning the engine room and flushing it with fresh water. He cleaned out the manual bilge pump and the high water bilge pump. Both were clogged with pieces of a small cardboard box that had gotten wet and disintegrated into the bilge. We normally keep cardboard out of the engine room. This was a relatively small box of rubber gloves Eric uses for changing oil and fuel filters. It had just gone empty. So it was tucked between two oil buckets waiting to be thrown in the trash. Instead that small box clogged two bilge pumps and caused no end of trouble. The third bilge pump turned out to be clogged with sawdust. We have purposely flooded our bilge to clean out sawdust, but never quite got the water as high as it got this time. We view the saw dust removal as another silver lining. While we were terrified, it turned out the situation wasn’t dangerous once the portholes were shut. Now the bilge is more cleared out so hopefully the bilge pumps won’t get clogged should a genuine leak develop.

Eric also set up the emergency bilge pump in a handier spot in the engine room. It is pre-wired for the boat’s 12 volt system, so should a situation like this arise again, all we need to do is plug the unit it, attach the hose, and run the hose outside. Eric has also removed the bilge pads we normally kept in there, seeing as they have the potential to get in the way of the bilge pump. He tightened up the screws on the latch of the back door, so now the door latches open properly again even in rough seas.

We went to a yacht chandlery and bought a couple new ropes. The rope we had lost was one of our longest ropes and absolutely needed to be replaced. Actually, it may be a blessing in disguise that we lost it, because our longest ropes weren’t long enough for the way they do things in the Med. In most places in the world, you tie one end of the rope to your boat, one to the shore. In the Med, rather than tie the rope to the cleat on shore, they simply loop the rope around the cleat and then you tie both ends to your boat. More often than not, we had to tie two ropes together to make the rope long enough to reach shore and back. We bought two ropes, both twice as long as the one we lost.

In the afternoon, Eric checked the heater/air conditioner more carefully, and noticed the breaker was flipped. He flipped in on and the system worked. Yay! What a relief. Having heat to help dry out the boat lifted our spirits. It wouldn’t be long now before things were dry and the boat could be repacked. And, it is one less thing to worry about fixing.

We took the coast guard commander out to dinner. We went to the same restaurant as the first night. He is a cool guy and we had a fun dinner. He told us the Aeolian Islands unit gets 40 calls a day in the summer. There are a lot of hazards in the water around there. Eric ordered a pasta flavored with squid ink. The pasta was black in a white creamy sauce. It was really good. Christi got stuffed calamari. She can’t remember what it was stuffed with, but it was good. The presentation was interesting. We actually get calamari often, and the presentation is sometimes quite unique. Chefs can get creative with calamari appearances.

Today is our 5 year wedding anniversary. Christi keeps saying that this year she got the best present of all her husband. There were a myriad of things that could have gone wrong that night and she is so thankful that all worked out and he was safe. We celebrated our anniversary by doing more cleaning up or the mess in the boat.

Christi put the forward bed back together, a task much easier said than done. Anyone who has ever tried to make the bed on a Nordhavn 43 can attest to what a pain in the behind it is. Putting the upholstery cover back on the foam mattress was a battle. She lost two rounds before finally enlisting Eric’s help. The mattress fights dirty. It kept hitting her in the face and knocking her glasses off. With the mattress back in place, she put away things that were dry. Unfortunately, she found a big stack of wet things that had been taken out from under the bed but had not been spread out to dry, so we still have a lot of wet things not quite ready to be put away. She also cleaned Eric’s tools that had gotten wet in the flood, trying to get the rust off them. And of course, laundry, laundry, laundry. We are so grateful we have a washing machine. We don’t know what we would have done without it. We just wish it were bigger so we didn’t have to do so many loads, or maybe faster so we could do more loads in a day, or ideally, both.

We did go out to dinner for our anniversary. We had a nice, but unspectacular meal. Christi ordered a salad with capers, olives, octopus, potatoes, tomatoes, celery, and just a touch of lettuce. Eric ordered a mixed appetizer plate that came with pieces of cheese, giant capers (which taste weird), some kind of peppers, sun dried tomatoes, and a small piece of fish. For his main course, Eric got fish seasoned with capers, olives and tomatoes. For dessert we had a torte with a layer of yellow cake on the bottom, a layer of blueberry cream, another layer of yellow cake, and a thick crème, almost like a crème brulee, on top.