The virus Christian brought back from the plane turned out to be quite persistent and annoying. Of course I got it two days after Christian and we’ve been snotty, sneezing and coughing a duet for over a week now. In the meantime we’ve managed to install the main pump of the watermaker. It’s too big to fit into the bilge like the old one, so we sacrificed half of the hanging space in our closet, fit the watermaker on the bottom half and Christian proved his skills as a carpenter and made a shelf on top of it (we got the wood from a hardware store and spent a while next to the road with our thumbs out until a car stopped for us and the big, bulky pieces of plywood we were carrying ).
Yesterday we finally found the energy to lift our anchor chain (still the old rusty one) and it took a few hours to clean off the growth, dirt and algae that had accumulated over 6 weeks in Arue, but now we have the new shiny chain on the bow. We’re now anchored off Marina Taina just south of Papeete where we’ll stay while we finish our next projects (new hoses for the autopilot, new bearings for the outboard and of course the rest of the watermaker installation).