We left San Francisco on February 10, 2010 with a plan to head south to Mexico and then make the innocently named "puddle jump" to the South Pacific (!!) this spring. From there, who knows?!?!?!? Maybe Fiji? Australia? New Zealand? For now, we're just thrilled to finally be out at sea! 
Before I show you pictures of the beautiful, bizarre Beveridge Reef and this crazy island country of Tonga, and before I depress you with serious posts about the soul-searching I’ve been doing, I thought that I would share with you the less glamorous side of our life…..
We are one of the lucky boats that has refrigeration. Actually, I guess I should say that we are one of the lucky boats that has MATT who painstakingly renovated the icebox and built a refrigeration system for us last year. When installing an icebox, the question comes up of whether you should install a drain for all those things that might leak or defrost, etc. One train of thought says – Yes! install the drain and let it all drain into the bilge. The other side says, no! Draining all that stuff into the bilge will make the bilge stink and you’ll never be able to get rid of the smell; it’s just easier to occasionally clean out the fridge…
I’m sure it’s infinitely more complicated than that, but that’s the extent of my understanding as to why we opted to not install a drain.
It probably wouldn’t be too much of an issue except that we have this thing going on with our evaporator plate that causes it to build up too much ice on one side (please no comments or advice), which then confuses the whole system and suddenly the temperature starts to go up and yada yada yada… moral of the story being that we occasionally have to turn off our fridge to allow the evaporator plate to defrost.
Which means lots of jenky nasty water mulling around in the bottom of our icebox.
It’s really fun when you pick up a can of beer and not only is it dripping wet, but the water trickling down from it is a funky grayish yellow because that leftover bit of curry spilled as you were setting the tupperware down on top of the two huge ice-tea containers.
Yeah.
Gross.
So, while we were in Tahiti, before we provisioned for the next half of our trip, I cleaned the icebox….
and, so, I thought you’d like to see pictures of the less glamorous side of this life.
the mess I made from pulling everything out of the fridge
the mess I made from provisioning after the fridge was done
Too bad no comments or advice. There’s a great trick for draining the fridge and not having stinky bilge that we use on EA.