to shower or not to shower? day/night #4

don't worry - this title does not mean we had our first shower on day 4.

having a water maker means you can enjoy a shower every day - which mark and i do. and this adds a real quality to life, especially on passage.
but when the water maker fails you are all of a sudden confronted with not only loosing this luxury, but also with thinking about rationing the emergency water supplies you have.

as i tried to start our precious water maker on day 4, i noticed, that there was water coming out of one of the prefilters. i immediately stopped the thing, but because there was water coming out, it also meant that there was air coming into the usually closed system.
so the boost pump got drained and went dry. we once had that problem in the beginning of our trip. we could not get the boost pump to bring salt water up to the filters and finally to the membrane to be desalinated.
step by step we eliminated the problems. first we checked the prefilter - and even though everything appeared normal, we found that the filter itself was the issue. so we changed the filter.
still - that bugger wouldn't run.
we then tried to prime the boost pump by taking off various hoses and filling them with water, sucking out airlock etc. - no success.
to cut a long story short - we stuffed around for 4h in the heat of the back room next to the running engine. after discovering that one of the hoses must have got a little hole when we used it to prime the pump we at last fixed that - voilá: watermaker is running again! and we can keep on having showers, which by that point we desperately needed.

sailing-wise the day has been very low in wind - so we went under engine most of the time.
at around 21:30 i got the sails out to ride a couple of winds from passing squalls - 2h later, penta had to jump in again.
at around 1:30 mark got the sails out again and we currently sail with a nice speed of around 7kn westwards on a course of 270°.
let's hope that the wind is here to stay!

apart from playing with boost pumps, the bananas started to ripen....so it will be "bananarama" on maloo the next days with banana-muffins, banana bread, banana pancakes - you name it.
the pineapples are close to follow - the papaya we had yesterday and was almost a bit too ripe though bought dark green - and the two melons will have to be eaten soon too.
i guess we should have some mac&cheese dinner to cancel out all these vitamines ;)