Sunday, June 14 As hard as it is on Eric to work the long days, he is actually enjoying work. He is enjoying being intellectually challenged and stimulated. He is enjoying being needed and recognized. Even though he misses cruising life and free time, he is getting a lot of fulfillment out of working.

The opposite is true for Christi. She finds being a housewife emotionally unfulfilling. She likes to cook and has been making nice meals, but she hates to clean, and after every meal, sighs warily at the pile of dishes. The highlight of the day for her is when Eric says dinner was good. She keeps telling people that she went from having the most interesting life of anyone she knows to the most boring in the blink of an eye. She misses the sense of fulfillment she got from work, the being needed and recognized for a job well done. She plans to look for a job after she finishes the book and is eager to get the book done ASAP.

On Thursday, we noticed the water pressure was low and the water pump was running louder than usual. Eric figured the pump was clogged and was too tired to fix it right then. Since the pump was still running, albeit a bit erratically, it could wait a little longer.

On Friday evening, Eric went to a party with “the guys” and Christi went to an arts and crafts group with “the girls”. Christi was the center of attention, with the women mostly asking about how horrible it was to be trapped with her husband all the time. In the last post, written a week ago, we commented about how one of the things we treasure most about the trip was so much time together, so this blew Christi’s mind. It sounds like this group of women has never been blessed with so much time with their spouse and don’t really how wonderful it can be.

On Sunday, Eric took a look at the water pump. The pump was leaking at the seams! Argh. It was tough getting that pump and it only lasted for 6 months! It has a 3 year warranty, so we’ll have to follow up with Shur-Flo. Eric changed the pump out. Fortunately, we had the spare on board that we got in Bonaire, so we didn’t have to run around looking for one. The new pump is working great and we have good water pressure again.

Eric took a look at the stabilizers and cannot figure out what is wrong with them. He thinks it might be electrical. Sigh. Eric also took another look at the coolant. He is now sure it being the transmission cooler o-ring leak. Right now the leak is tiny, but will likely worsen over time. The problem is that we need to haul the boat out in order to completely drain the coolant, and with Eric working so much, hauling out the boat is not happening any time soon. Sigh.

And, a blog question:

Q: Do you feel the stabilizers have fallen short of being considered reliable?

A: The reason we opted for paravanes is because we were aware that, generally speaking, automatic stabilizers are the first major systems that fail. In doing our research, we found the percentage of stabilizer failures to be a bit discouraging. We picked the brand with the lowest failure rate, American Bow Thruster. At first, we had a hard time with paying so much money for something that was possible not reliable. But now that we know how hard the stabilizers work, we now feel they are worth every penny of both initial cost and repair costs. We ran the system 99% of the time around the world, although briefly we were only running one fin. ABT has been fantastic to work with and we have no complaints about them at all. For more details on our stabilizer problems and repairs, see here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Coming up: More summary, more Q & A, repairs to Kosmos, a trip to Yosemite.