I'll explain the photo above in a bit. The real topic of today's blog is a confession... yes, we have been lying to you. All the wonderful photos like these showing a well appointed interior of Seas The Day, with all the bed made and everything in it's place, describe the interior for precisely one moment. Once we move aboard for a trip, all hell breaks loose inside. I awoke this morning to what looked like a bomb having went off. Electronics were connected to various outlets and a maze of charging wires that looked like an obstacle course (I guess it was in a way). Before the end of the day, it will look much worse.
Breakfast was relatively simple... berries and oatmeal with some lemon loaf we had from Wednesday. The heat rose fast and a fair bit of the morning was simply trying to stay in the path of the breeze from a fan. (Temperatures were in the mid-90s, high humidity and Seas The Day was essentially a moist oven.)
Eventually we Ubered into Jersey City and found a spa (my back was yelling at me from all the motion while sailing in the previous day), and from there a nice restaurant and grocery store near each other. So we had lunch and and then did a bit of grocery shopping for an evening on-board snack (all the while enjoying the air conditioning immensely) and then returned to the boat.
Vicky's classmate, Aihong, and her family, YangJie, and LingLing (who we had dinner with last night) came aboard and we departed for a quick close up of the statue. It was a quick out-and-back trip and I let them do most of the photography. Here's a few I captured. (If they send any photos, I'll put them at the end.)
Once we returned, we had a mini photo shoot at the marina (the photo at the top of this post), and then enjoyed Vicky's spread - fruit, olives, pickles, some bread and cheese and even green tea chocolate and chocolate covered potato chips (you read that correctly).
As sunset approached, we had another photo shoot (including a selfie).
At this point, Vicky left with them to get them back to the ferry (it turns they missed the last one and had to wait a long time for Uber).
My job was to start the dishes, and at that point I discovered that we had no water pressure. (To be honest, I had an inkling that something was wrong when I tried to take a shower earlier in the day... it was just dribbles of water. Yet another "Don't ignore small problems on a boat" moment.) So I pulled out the owners manual - yes Seas The Day has one (it's a big binder) - and set about trying to find and clean anything I could think of relating to the water system.
This involved some "Boat Yoga" (having to move items and get into weird positions to access parts), though the Catalina 315 is relatively well designed and it wasn't too taxing (but it did make a huge mess - each access required moving all our stuff, then the various boat parts blocking access). It almost makes this morning's mess above look quaint.
I remember Captain Gary on our delivery trip having to move the forward berth mattresses to access a filter, but it turns out that was the filter for the shower drain (realized only after contemplating how the mess of hair and gunk was in our "drinking" water). I'll spare you the photo of that filter, but let you know that I now realized that needs to be cleaned more than once every 5 years.
After going back to the owners manual and doing a bit of creative interpretation of the plumbing diagram, I found the main water pump under the dinette. There was a filter for that and maybe a bit of calcium deposits, but not enough to explain what was going on. I was able to get enough of a trickle to get the dishes done. I'm guessing tomorrow we'll have to pay someone a lot to come over and do a little thing that we're missing.
I finished the dishes, got some of the mess stowed away, and was relaxing in the cockpit when suddenly I heard cheering and glanced up to see this... Fireworks! Yea... 4th of July... wow... I completely forgot.
So I grabbed the Nikon and quickly took some shots. These are all crap. I knew I had no time to pull out the tripod and look for a good site, so I opted to use the low light capabilities for a few snapshots to give readers a hint of what we were able to see. Unfortunately, the wind brought the smoke across lower Manhattan (the fireworks were in the East River on the other side) and obscured most of the fireworks after the first few minutes.
The Jersey City fireworks took place right behind the John Hancock building.
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