Friday, Nov. 7 — The full moon was still up this morning and shining brightly.

Since we’ve missed our weather window to Bermuda, we needed to form a new cruising plan. We’ve decided that once the repairs were completed, we’ll go back to Little Creek to wait for another weather window to Bermuda.

Eric continued to work on repairs/maintenance while Christi and Keith did school. He noticed that the bilge pump sea strainer and hose was leaking. That part was awkward to access, so tightening the sea strainer was difficult.

Eric added more glue to the laz seal in hopes that it would help with making the seal watertight.

When it was time for the spare bilge pump to be delivered, Eric went up to the office to collect it. Much to his frustration, he found out that West Marine hadn’t had the part in stock. He wished someone had given him a head’s up that the part wouldn’t be arriving, after all.  

Once school work was done, all three of us tested the exterior drains to make sure they were properly draining. And they weren’t! They were draining slow. We squirted hose water down the drains with as much force as we could, and we did get a clog out of one of them. That helped, but it was still draining a bit slow. We’re going to try unclogging the drains again in Little Creek, where the water pressure was better. 

Then we tested the lazarette seal by running the hose full force with as much pressure as possible along the edge of the hatch. There was still a slight leak from the hatch locks. Eric adjusted the locks again and added grease to the locks to repel the water.  

Here were some photos from around the marina. View of the marina from Kosmos.

Boat yard portion

Boat yard portion

We went to an early dinner at the marina restaurant, called Capt Pat’s at Dennis Point.

They really only had seafood and sides, so Keith was unhappy about his choices as he was not a seafood fan. He wound up ordering several side dishes instead of a meal. The hush puppies were amazing. Christi liked them so much that she ordered a basket to-go so we could have some for the passage tomorrow. Eric ordered the gumbo and it was fantastic.

Sunset

After we returned from dinner, it rained, which we were thankful for. We hadn’t washed the back of the boat yet because of the leaking laz, and it needed a good wash down to remove all the salt from that terrible passage. Because of the angle of the rain, we knew that there wouldn’t be enough water in the cockpit to be a problem.

The rain wasn’t the only thing we were thankful for. We were thankful for everything that had happened the last couple of days. While emergencies were never fun, this emergency turned out to be only a minor inconvenience. In different circumstances, it could have been a much more difficult.

We were thankful to find out that the new lazarette seal wasn’t watertight when we were someplace we could stop and deal with it. Normally, we only have water coming into the cockpit in the open ocean, where there was nowhere to stop.

In the same vein, we were thankful that our low water bilge pump died someplace we could stop to replace it, rather than having to replace it at sea.

Likewise, we were thankful that we realized access to the bilge pump was blocked when we were someplace calm, making it possible to replace the pump without having to disable the water maker. Making the low-water bilge pump easier to access was on the to-do list for Little Creek.

We were thankful that it happened on a night with a full moon brightly shining, which helped a lot with navigating and anchoring.

We were thankful that we found a calm, safe, easy to access anchorage that was relatively close.

We were thankful there was a super protected marina nearby where we could work on the boat.

We feel truly blessed at this opportunity to identify Kosmos’s weaknesses and fix them in such an overall safe situation, which helped ensure that our next passage out in the open ocean would be safe and problem-free.