Watermaking, inter alia.
Antigua is wet and rainy this morning, a blessing for this parched nation.
We hear tales of drought here, the reservoir will dry up by the end of the month. After spending three weeks in the frozen North, no sun in sight for weeks on end, the sun and warmth on our return Friday was a blessing. As we upped the anchors, we covered Django in grey sticky mud, so off to the fuel dock for water to fill the tanks and rinse her off. We did buy some beer as well, but not enough to justify the bill of EC$350, a staggering sum.
While away for Christmas, I looked into how to get my Pur Survivor 35 watermaker up and running. Watermakers have reverse osmosis membranes which must either be used every day, or be pickled in a growth inhibiting chemical, so as not to clog up with algal flora. Ours was in the pickled state when we bought the boat in Jan 2008. The note on the intake filter said she was put into storage on August 7, 2007. The watermaker has been low on my list of things I need to become an expert at, so it has remained much as we found it. A bit of reading on the Katadyn watermaker internet site revealed that Pur was taken over by Katadyn some years ago, that the maximum safe storage period for a membrane is twelve months, and that I would be able to order up spare parts and a new membrane, to be delivered in Montreal before we left for Antigua. So that's what we did.
The Pur 35 is squeezed into a small space beside the starbord water tank. I would take a picture for you, but we have left the camera behind in Montreal. This is a challenge for me, although not for K, who has been unable to reliably upload photos to her blog, and to whom the lack of a camera may be felt less keenly. I will have to make up with verbal accuity.
I was daunted by the apparant difficulty of accessing our Pur Survivor 35, but not enough to make me read the instructions which came with the membrane right away. Dicking around is always more fun. Anyway, the thing was done, the pre-filter drained, washed and reassembled, and the switch thrown; I watched the first product pee slowly out into a bottle as a test sample. I let the bottle fill several times to clear the pickle juice and flush the lines, then shut down and tasted the result. Pure clean salt water, so that didn't work. After the second try at disassembly of the membrane, I twigged that one of the O-rings on the new membrane assembly was damaged. Luckily, I had ordered the spare parts kit as well and found a suitable replacement. Now it works, and K and I are getting used to the low level heartbeat of the pump as it squeezes out a thimbleful of pure fresh water with each cycle.
English Harbour is full. We are squeezed in close to shore with an anchor set off the stern to keep us from swinging onto the rocks. Terry is always useful. He tells me he set a mooring in Freemans Bay, just the other side of the harbour entrance, under the lee of Shirley Heights, which has not been used for years. It is a Perkins 4-236 diesel engine, the very thing we had aboard Weemelah in Bermuda and plenty large enough to hold Django. He says we can use it if we can find it in 6 to 8 feet of water. That's another project, such fun. It would be good to have all set up and ready to go before Frisha and Whit arrive on Friday.
The price of oil has been dropping off; a very good thing, in my opinion, although I would like it to fall another few dollars, if it please the powers that be. Next week will tell. There is really no good reason for it to be so high. I have been reading "The Wayfinders, Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World" by Wade Davis, produced as a series of lectures and presented as the "2009 Massey Lectures" across Canada. Really good stuff!
