A Week Aboard S/V Sabado: 3/27/2022 – 4/3/2022

Have you seen our latest YouTube video? It’s my favorite one so far this year!

Last Sunday, we hung out at home. I polished some of our stainless steel, and Ray ordered some boat parts to ship to my parents’ house for us to pick up later! 

Monday morning, we decided to head to shore. We dinghied in, tied up, and walked to the nearest West Marine to pick up a new sea strainer for our watermaker. We stopped by a pub for lunch before heading back to the boat and getting started on yet another watermaker-related project (our 3rd this year). 

To summarize, our watermaker sucks in seawater and runs it through a series of filters to convert it into freshwater. Recently, we began getting alarms indicating that it was time to change the filter, but when we looked, the filter was fine. After taking the whole thing apart, Ray found a check valve clogged with seaweed. It turns out the sea strainer that comes with the watermaker was placed after this check valve. We were always impressed that our sea strainer was so clean… we didn’t realize we had a check valve doing its job instead! 

After talking to the manufacturer, we were instructed to install a second sea strainer ourselves before the check valve to solve the problem. So, that’s what we did! 

We made sure we had all the parts and tools we’d need ready to go but decided it was too hot to do that day, so it’d have to wait until the following morning.

After breakfast on Tuesday, we got to work! Ray climbed down into the engine compartment and began fitting a new hose into the system while I stood overhead, handing him whatever tools he needed and asking questions. Like all boat projects, it took longer than we anticipated and made a massive mess in our cockpit, but we finished late that afternoon- leaving just enough time to do a little bit of reading/video editing and enjoy some cocktails on the bow before sunset. 

Wednesday was supposed to be our departure day, but we woke up to white caps in the anchorage. We checked the weather, and what had been forecasted as “scattered squalls” had been revised to a multi-day front. So, we decided to stay put! We were in a good spot in a large anchorage with good holding. There was no reason to leave in suboptimal conditions. We spent the day cleaning up the cockpit and reading our books. 

By Thursday you could see the impact the wind had on the water- here is a picture from Tuesday (pre-wind) and Thursday morning (post- wind) 

The water went from clear green/blue to practically opaque gray from the amount of sand that was disturbed! 

It was still too breezy to do much, so we kept ourselves busy at home. I decided to clean the ceiling of our cockpit- which I have literally never done- and you would not believe how gross it was! I guess I need to add that into my usual cleaning routine!

Ray worked on figuring out how to collect and compile data from our watermaker so that we can identify trends that could help us better understand when something is wrong… because it took over a year for the check valve to get clogged enough for us to notice, and it’s always better to identify a problem as early as possible. 

Saturday the weather was deceptively nice. We relaxed, laid out in the sunshine for a while, and made a nice steak dinner before heading to bed, only to be rudely awakened around 1am by lots of lightning. The wind had picked back up, and we were grateful to not have any boats around to worry about dragging into us.

The storm passed us early this morning and it’s looking like today will be gorgeous! We’re hoping to get out of here in the next couple of days. 

And that’s all I have to report! I hope you had a great week! ❤️