I had been telling myself I should clean out the dunnage boxes on Doramac, but forgetting every chance I had.  Well, half the time I would forget and the other half I just didn’t do it.  Today I finally tackled the job and it is dirty work, but the results are very satisfying.  I did  two of them and will work on the others another day. The spare propeller and the drogue and its line were in the first box I tackled.   Unfortunately when I unpacked the drogue, I just dumped it anyway I could.  But it was, and must be stowed in a certain way so that when you need it, it’s ready. Now I know that.   ” A drogue is a device to slow a boat down in a storm so that it does not speed excessively down the slope of a wave and crash into the next one”   Wikepedia  Kind of like a parachute you hang out the stern (back) of the boat.  You have it and hope you never need it because , if you did, you would be in a pretty big storm.  Hopefully we never need the spare propeller either.  It was really heavy so Randal had to get it out of the dunnage box.  He was not overjoyed to see the drogue out in a mess.  But the dunnage box is now clean, very white instead of green!!! 

The parachute part is the blue under all of that line.  The propeller is pretty obvious.  I wish I knew things without learning after the fact.  I would have skipped that box and picked a different.  Oh well.

  The clean dunnage box behind the cockpit. 

The whole inside of the box looked like the gray/green area on this sign, only worse. 

A definitely satisfying job when it all looks clean at the end.  And you thought we were off just having fun all of the time!

  The front dunnage box was trickier because it won’t stay up by itself.  I had to get a BoBo-Zoey stool to help me.  There are 2 more front boxes to clean.  I kept the others from getting any of the soap/bleach wash by plugging the drain hole in the left hand corner with a wine cork!  Cleaning this dunnage box took more brain than brawn just to figure out how to do it.

  Big Red!!  Our huge, too heavy deck cover.  We hope to get something that is lighter in weight.  It does shade the front half of the boat really well and also keeps rain out of the front hatches.

  My avocado plant.  When we went to Puerto Galera, Heidi who lives 2 boats over with JR plant sat.  It grew lots of leaves so I had to give it a trim just before its photo.  I have given it some shells and coral for company. 

Tomorrow evening we are driving into Manila with Nick and Zaida for a few days.  To help with the traffic congestion, license plates indicate days you can’t be in Manila so we can’t get there until after 7 pm. 

Randal is now trying to put the drogue back in the box.  I think I’ll go help!