It's raining!

I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the first rain we've seen since we left San Diego last April (well, there was that time we drove to CA). I forgot what it was like! Wet! Evidently, the ITCZ (Inter Tropical Convergence Zone)is known for squalls. Now when I thought of squalls, I thought of major storms, thunder, lightening etc. That's not what we're getting... just your everyday storm, mostly sprinkles with a few good showers...all night and all day.

So it seemed like the perfect time to try out our rain catch system. In addition to our water maker, Savannah came with a pretty elaborate rain catch system. While in La Cruz, Andy spent some time figuring out how it worked, replacing old tubing and adding filters. For those who are always asking for something more technical, I've asked Andy to contribute here...

How it works:
There is a small gutter system in our cabin top that catches rain into small catch pans and it's piped down inside the boat. It is diverted overboard until the cabin top is washed off, then it's diverted back through a series of tubes and a filter system into our water tanks. If we don't need to use it, we divert it overboard the whole time.

Benefits:
Now for the cool part. Our water maker makes 8 gallons of water an hour at 8 amps. We have the spectra water maker which is still considered (I think), somewhat top of the line. In the last 15 minutes, we filled up our water tanks with about 30 gallons of water through the rain catch system and didn't use one amp! Now that's efficiency! I'm not knocking the water maker, because it's been a dream all summer long, I'm just saying, time to give it a break.

Onto other things...I'm feeling like a regular old Betty Crocker out here. Yesterday, tired of pancakes, french toast, eggs, potatoes, etc. for breakfast, I decided to plan ahead and make some dough for cinnamon rolls this morning. Well, over a lb of flour later and a dough ball bigger than all of our heads put together, I have enough for the next 10 days! This morning Jake and I rolled a piece out and made all the fillings and we had our first homemade cinnamon rolls (at least my first time making them). They didn't turn out too bad if I do say so myself. Jake thought they were "the best thing I've ever eaten." Of course he's been known to describe his PB&J that way too. But even Betty Crocker needed a break, so we may very well have popcorn for supper tonight. The routine of cook, do dishes, school/laundry, cook, do dishes, play/laundry, cook, do dishes, play/laundry is wearing on me.

Either tonight or tomorrow we're going to turn south and make a run for the equator. We've seen a few boats get stuck and a few boats plow right through. I don't know if that has to do with who turns on their motor or not, but we're going to give it a shot. We're not adverse to motoring through as we carry plenty of diesel and have certainly gotten the view out here already. We've been running our motor for about an hour each day to keep the batteries charged anyway (the fridge and autopilot are sucking up juice with all this cloud cover). So wish us luck!

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