Our good luck ran out. Last night we waited until it was dark to roll up the sun shade. It takes all of us and Papa has to stand up on the bench at the stern of the boat to buckle the rolled up canvas. Well, it was dark, windy, and the seas were a little crazy. He was stumbling around and almost falling multiple times before the actual flop. He fell backwards (into the boat, thank goodness) and did some sort of complicated shin-skin-on-the-bench-and-bounce-off-the-nav-thing. In short, he fell off the bench hurting his shin and pride pretty badly.
That's not all, though! This morning, Mama looked down and saw that there was a fair amount of water under the floorboards. That meant the boards needed to be pulled up and the water needed to be drained. Despite his roughed up shin, Papa bailed the water with Mama's help while Nora and I pumped the bilge dry. We think it's just water that has come in when we've had the hatches open, not a leak.
Again, that's not all! Shortly after the water problem, everyone was in the cockpit except for Papa. Before I go into this, remember that we made a four week passage in the rough North Pacific, we've all cooked, showered, cleaned, changed clothes, etc. in the rocking boat and we've all been fine. Now, we were all in the cockpit except Papa when a rogue wave popped up out of nowhere and came over the bow of the boat drenching anything/everything and also tipping us at an extreme angle to the starboard (right). Papa flew across the cabin attempting to stop himself with his elbow and other flailing appendages and landed hard on the threshold to the bathroom. The door is basically a rectangular cut out in the wall. The thing is, there's 4-5 inches between the floor and the bottom of the door. This is the ledge that Papa landed on. He says no ribs are cracked and we joked that there is no internal bleeding but there is a large bruise, so....
Other than all of that, we've had a nice day. We'll reach the equator tomorrow (at least, our definition of it), there were no squalls, and the wind is finally shifting back to the desired direction. However, everyone's hands are absolutely disgusting. The salt has somehow killed the top layer of skin and convinced it to leave us. You could probably trace our path from the lovely bits we leave behind. We haven't caught any fish yet. The sunset was beautiful.
Also, Nora is frustratingly good at chess. No one can beat her, but Mama came pretty darn close.
In all seriousness, everyone is fine, no one is broken, we were and are all tethered to the boat, and everything was completely safe at all times.
Latitude: 1.3369 N
Longitude: 154.8477 W
https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?zoom=4&size=600x300&markers=color:purple%7C1.3369,-154.8477
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