This morning the wind had pretty much died and the marina was, for the most part, calm. Praise the Lord! We slept great and woke up full of energy, determined to get a lot done to make up for all the wasted days last week when we were too lethargic from the rocking to do much. It was ominously gray and cloudy all day, but it never really rained.

Eric set out to find a gasket and shaft packing tool. He went to two chandleries. The second chandlery sent him to a machine shop to have a gasket made. Eric arrived at the shop holding his home made gasket and the leftover gasket material we had gotten in Greece. The machine shop guys dropped what they were doing to make a gasket for him right then and there. And they only charged him $12 USD! Eric gave them a tip for doing it on the spot. They made the gasket much the same way that Eric had, except they had superior tools that made the job simple and fast. As a side note, we both studied Spanish in school. While we certainly cannot carry on a conversation, it makes life a lot easier when you can say enough words to convey things like “Can you make one of these for me?” to someone who speaks no English at all.

Eric never did find the shaft packing tool, but he did find the switch that he had just replaced in the shower, so now we have a spare switch again. He was also delighted to see they high grade of oil (CI & J) in stock, which has been difficult to find. We’ve only seen it in Monaco and Australia. He’ll have to go back for that later.

Eric arrived back at Kosmos, cautiously excited, fingers crossed that it would fit. We are happy to report that it did fit and 45 minutes later project #3 was crossed off the “to do” list. Good start to the day.

Meanwhile, Christi cleaned, did laundry and prepared some more “at sea meals”.

We were commenting about how the Simrad guy should be arriving at any minute to complete project #4 when we realized it was getting to be kind of late in the day, so we called him to get his ETA. He told us he was sorry, but there was a delay in shipping and the cable would not arrive for another two days. Darn. Everything was going so perfectly up until we got that news. Now can’t leave tomorrow as planned.

At dinner time, we ventured out to the Japanese restaurant we had wanted to go to the other day. We ordered teppanyaki because we like the show. We are sad to report that the chef only made the fried rice in front of us, and it was no show. He quietly fried an egg, mixed with rice and served. Everything else came from the kitchen in back. The sushi roll choices were also disappointing. They only had plain rolls with one kind of fish inside and nothing on top. No cool caterpillar rolls or rainbow rolls or volcano rolls. Pity. However, the food was good. We tried a dessert we have never seen before called samurai banana. It was pieces of banana wrapped in a soft dough and rolled in coconut. It was served hot, but the dough was super soft and not brown, so we suspect it may have been steamed as opposed to baked or fried. It was not at all sweet.

A huge lightening storm started at 2330, then at midnight it began to rain violently. The rain lasted all night. Eric stayed up until the wee hours of the morning watching the storm.

Since this is a short post, we’ll add in a random observation. In both Paris and Mallorca, the pedestrian signals at traffic intersections are weird. They only cover half the intersection. Meaning, the little green man means it is safe for you to proceed to the median, where you stop and wait for another little green man to tell you it is safe to cross the rest of the street. I am sure it works fine for the locals, but it is dangerous for foreigners like us. When we see a little green man, we walk. It doesn’t occur to us to look to see if it is green man #1 or #2, and a few times now we have almost been run over for looking at the wrong guy.