Thank you very much for all the e-mails and advices about my SSB radio. I was given a small handheld transmitter by another sailor, so if the other ships are not too far away I can listen in to the radio traffic. I had planned to scrape off the growth from the underwater hull of my boat but it is too rainy and dark over here, and so I better wait until the sun shines again… I am now so used to the warm weather that I much prefer to swim on sunny days only – at 28°C [82,4 °F] the water temperature seems pretty chilly to me… hihi. Instead I ‘dived’ down to the engine room to check…the engines again. I refilled the Yanmar with oil because it uses so much oil, unlike the Volvo engine that doesn’t. I found another dead cockroach in the bilge and I immediately sent it to a watery grave. I think that all the cockroaches must be dead by now – I haven’t seen a single live one for the last few months. Because it was raining all day, I decided to make a real rain catcher from an old piece of sail that I found during my clean up. Of course, when I had finished working on it, the heavy rain had stopped so I could only catch five litres of rainwater [1,3 US Gallons]. Well, it is better than nothing. Tomorrow everything will be back to the usual opening hours here, and then I will see if I can find some diesel fuel and where to go for groceries.

Laura