This week of Glenny’s visit has absolutely sailed by. It was hard to realize that today was departure day and our visit was over. Paula tried to ease the sting by making Glennis “Adam and Eve on a Raft” eggs for breakfast and packing her a lunch and snacks to take on the plane. Our fifteen-year-old microwave  chose this morning to die, likely due to grief that Glennis was returning to California.

We walked down to the beach to look out one more time for “Barry” the Barracuda and were amazed at the way the wind had stiffened and how quickly caused the sea state to be disturbed. We got to watch an impressive feat of captaincy as the pilot of an 84 foot Azimut yacht piloted the huge vessel backwards out the narrow channel in the face of current, whitecaps, and wind. It had come into the marina nose first and tied up yesterday. Today it backed out from its slip and then again from its subsequent tie-up at the gas dock. The boat was just too long to turn around in the narrow fairways of the marina. She came in yesterday forwards, and left today, backwards! We also saw some of the charter catamarans return, and having a very bouncy time of it. They are all now safe in port (featured picture).

Glennis collected her bag and all three of us walked to the marina office to pick up the courtesy car for our trip to the airport. The marina staff wished her a safe trip and we socialized for a few minutes.

Traffic was good, and we felt almost comfortable with the route and traffic roundabouts, given that we’ve taken these roads a few times. We hugged and said our goodbyes.

After we returned to the marina, we lost no time in attempting the cleaning of the watermaker membrane with the cleaning solution Glennis had brought from the states. We briefly talked about a problem with our watermaker in a previous post. In a nutshell, the last three times we made water before coming to Palm Cay the quality of the product water got worse and worse to the point where it was not drinkable. We still used it for washing the dishes, cleaning, and washing ourselves, but ceased putting it into our main water tank for drinking water. This was a big reason why we came to Palm Cay so early in advance of Glennis’s visit. Tommy was able to correspond with a technician from the watermaker manufacturer who recommended a membrane cleaning procedure to make sure any leftover membrane preservative chemical that may not have been flushed from the system was completely neutralized. Since this procedure takes about four hours, we waited until after Glennis left to start. It involved mixing the cleaning chemical with water and heating it up in a pot to 120 degrees.

We then led the watermaker inlet hose into the pot and led the output hose into the same pot. This way, the watermaker would re-circulate the cleaning fluid through itself by way of the pot. At the end of the procedure the quality of the product water appeared better, but it was too late in the day to commence with a long watermaker run. We’ll run it for a while tomorrow before declaring success.

While the membrane cleaning was happening, Tom also undertook to try and fix our microwave oven. Shortly after getting the cover off, it was apparent that a fuse on the power cord on the inside of the unit was blown. He replaced the fuse and all seemed back to almost normal. We suspect the reason the fuse blew is related to the ever increasing noise coming from the little motor that turns the glass plate inside the microwave. We will try to repair that when we get back to Florida.

Dinner was thawed and re-heated cooked shrimp piccata, left-over Brussels sprouts, rice and couscous. In addition, Tommy requested ice cream treat at the marina coffee shop for desert.

Last night the wind kicked up to 20+ knots and remained that way all day today. It is forecast to go higher tomorrow through Friday, gusting above 30 knots throughout that time. We were supposed to leave here tomorrow but will stay until conditions subside, which now may not be until Saturday.