Today was a day off for me, I slept an extra two hours this morning, this felt wonderful. When I woke up my forehead was soar but other than that everything else seemed ok.
I didn’t feel I missed a good day of swimming. Had I decided to swim, I wouldn’t have made great progress. The waves and wind had changed direction, the waves were coming mostly from the east, and I had swum I would have had to fight them all day long.
I used this time to do some repairs on my wetsuits, something I had wanted to do for a while. I have been using 4 wetsuits and rotating them depending on how dry they were. It is amazing to see how much damage the elements are doing to the rubber. I can tell which wetsuit has been used the most just by looking on how fragile the rubber has become. The rubber of the one I have used the most and has been exposed to the sun and sea the longest is cracked and has the most tears around the shoulders. So I took my day to inspect all of them very closely and glue the small tears and put patches on the bigger ones.
It was also a day for other general boat maintenances. Before leaving San Pedro, CA our base camp, we did many repairs and upgrades on the boat. One of them was for the main engine exhaust pipe. We replaced an entire section that was corroded and leaked fumes by a new one. Yoav found out that an area of new section was cracked and water was sipping through. He patched it, but we have yet to find out if the patch will hold and not melt off once the exhaust gets hot.
The ocean is definitely a hostile environment for all of our equipment and we constantly have to protect and repair it.
It is not easy on us human either.
Ben
