March 22, 2020: Day 4 of Extreme Harris Social Distancing Boat Life
Stormy skies…literally and figuratively. We continue to wrestle with the emotional pull home and the logical pull to stay put. Lots of opinions, lots of people making their decisions one way or another. For the time being we’ve decided to stay here and not pursue an option (now which are very very limited) to haul and store the boat and fly back to Canada. And what better to celebrate this decision than…being stuck all day on the boat during crazy rainstorms.
So much rain today! Like maybe the most we’ve seen on this trip since the hazy days on the Chesapeake last summer. On the one hand, rain squalls coming every hour or so really keeps you on the boat…there isn’t much one can do in under and hour when you live on a boat. Everything takes tons of time. Not to mention the wind gusts that accompany each squall were fairly strong so if you were in the water at that time you might find yourself working really hard to swim back to the boat (ahem, been there). As such, the kids were not having any swim time or really any outdoor time at all…we managed to not kill each other but you could really feel the tension layered onto what would normally but just a chill boat-day (thanks so much he-who-must-not-be-named). We basically ate healthy food, drank tea, peed a lot, and watched Pirates of the Caribbean 3…cliche I know.
On the other hand, the rain squalls allowed us to capture so much fresh water it was crazy! We have a water maker (which Greg has written about) so capturing water isn’t something we trouble ourselves with…however, thanks to he-who-must-not-be-named we are all thinking a bit more that we already did (and we did a lot already) about conservation of resources. Making water means we have to run the generator, which means we have to burn diesel, which isn’t a renewable resource and if times of crisis on an island could become scarce. Yes we have a ton of diesel (we filled up in Jolly Harbour just a few months ago) and no the island is not out of fuel…but the rain seemed like a good opportunity to practice further conservation. So we set up buckets and used the bimini to capture enough rain water to do all of our laundry. It was pretty cool actually! It was shocking how fast it collected and, if we had wanted to, we could have filled out water tanks with it too.
Why didn’t we?
Weeelllll in order to do that you have to stop up the deck drains and have all the water flow along your deck into the tanks…but our deck is teak and not super clean (not at all clean) and that would introduce a bunch of gnarly bits of dirt, salt and hair into our tanks which right now are pristine with RO water. But we could if we had to and we do have multiple carbon filters and a UV purifier so we could drink it and be totally fine.
The rain was the primary excitement of the day…and kept us from doing what Greg really wanted to do. He and Harry (from S/V Bliss) dove on a reef on the other side of the anchorage the other day and he was really excited to show it to the rest of us. Big coral heads, tons of fish, shallow enough to see things but deep enough to practice free diving and not worry about bashing into anything poke-y or burn-y or bite-y. He kept hoping that it would clear up but by 4pm we called it and put the gear away for the day.
Since it looks like we’ll be here for a while I’m pretty sure we’ll have another chance.
Much love
