When the volcano blow

Quinn noticed it first. Daddy, can I have a paper towel? My firetruck is dirty and I want to clean it. I got him a paper towel, thinking it was odd his new firetruck was so dirty he felt he needed to clean it, but didn't really pay any attention. Then, 10 minutes later, he's asking for another paper towel and so I decided to see what the big deal was. He's usually not very interested in things being kept clean! Sure enough, it was covered in grit. Hmmm. Odd. Then Jen noticed that their was a lot of grit building up on the generator hatch out in cockpit and I saw the dusting of grit on the floor by the open door. Suddenly it clicked, and we groaned. With the light winds, we must be getting ash from either the inactive (but smoking) volcano on Guadeloupe, or from Montserrat.

We buttoned the boat up tight and watched as ash built up all over Mirasol's decks. It was still coming down at bedtime and we retired with the hope that it would stop by morning. Happily, when dawn came we weren't getting much of anything settling on our decks although the air was still hazy with ash.

A quick exploration of the decks showed that we had collected about 1/16th inch of very fine grit ash on every surface of the boat, including the mast, standing rigging and lines. WHAT A MESS!

Since the grit would scratch just about anything it was rubbed against, we kept Quinn inside while I started the long process of removing the ash. While Jen and Quinn had a very good session of school (Quinn learned to add 3 to numbers 1-10), I pulled out the hose, flipped the wash-down pump to seawater and started washing Mirasol down.

I am SO happy we have a wash-down pump on board that we can switch from seawater to fresh water. While most the other boaters in the anchorage were using buckets to wash down the decks I had the advantage of being able to hose the boat down. Sluicing the the boat from top to bottom with seawater made me cringe but it was the only way to get her clean, and we certainly didn't have enough fresh water on board to do the job. It took about 3 hours to do a first pass and then a quick rinse of the stainless fittings and winches with some of our fresh water to get her clean enough to operate. We moved into a marina this afternoon so we'll have plenty of fresh water to finish the job. First stay in a marina since mid December.

Jen will post pics soon.