Here is the sunrise on Tuesday, September 6. Look at how bright the moon is despite the early morning sun.
Not long after that photo was taken, the wind picked up. We had 17-knot sustained winds with gusts to 25-knots for pretty much the entire day. Since the wind was coming from the same direction as the hurricane would be coming from, this was actually a blessing. It meant all the boats were pushed into the place that they will be during the storm, allowing each of us to more accurately judge if we are far enough away from other boats/hazards to be safe on Thursday. One boat left, deciding they’d rather ride the storm out in the Bay of LA than Don Juan. A few boats repositioned themselves into different spots here in Don Juan.
We spent the day doing chores. Christi was glad she’d gotten so much done yesterday; while the wind chop wasn’t terrible, Kosmos was moving a lot more than yesterday, and thus, chores were a bit tougher today.
In the afternoon, one of the families came over. The adults talked about hurricane preparation while the kids played. The sailboats have to do a lot more work to prepare for the hurricane than we do.
Since the wind was strong and the wind chop big enough to make us wet if we tried to use the dinghy, we never left Kosmos. The winds would only be stronger tomorrow, so we decided we may as well stow the dinghy today. We brought the dinghy in and secured it at sunset, when the wind decreased a little bit.
In the evening, Eric noticed the bilge pump going off. There was no reason for water to be in the bilge, so he went to check if there was a problem. It looked like we had a freshwater leak. Eric thinks the leak has probably been going on for a while. Lately, he’s been complaining about how he’s been having a hard time keeping up with our freshwater usage, which hadn’t been a problem in the past — and we aren’t using more water than normal.
We’re keeping the pump off when not in use until he locates the source of the leak and repairs it. Finding the leak may be tough and may require tearing the whole boat apart. It is poor timing that this issue popped up when everything needs to be stowed for the storm.
The other frustrating bit of evening news was that the weather forecasts for the storm had worsened to 50 knot sustained winds.
On Wednesday, it was sunny and calm when we woke up in the morning. That didn’t last long. By 0800 it was windy. At 1000, the clouds rolled in. At 1500, it started to rain.
Amazingly enough, Eric found the leak in nearly thd first place he looked, the access panel for the master stateroom shower. And the leak was from a connector, not from a hole in the pipe. Yay! Once he’d located the problem, we realized that there has probably been slight leak in the shower for years that has recently worsened. Eric did a quick patch job. He’ll have to go back and do a proper repair sometime soon, but it’s good enough for now.
In bad news, we discovered that about half of the food in our freezer had defrosted. We guess we must have overfilled it. Sadly, we lost all our ice cream.
In good news, the air temperature was cooler than it has been lately and the strong breeze kept the boat well-ventilated, so at least we could use the oven without having heat stroke. Once cooked, many of the foods could be re-frozen, so little of the food needed to be thrown out. And at least it happened in a remote anchorage where Christi would be cooking anyway.