Wifi is slow today. Maybe because there’s heavy rain outside. For desert-like Bonaire, I guess that’s no small thing. This, after all, is their rainy season. In a couple of days, the island will probably bloom with amazing desert wildflowers. In the north of the island, there is a large national park, the Washington-Slagbaii Park. This would probably be the place to see the flowers bloom.

Because it’s hurricane season, we are watching the weather forecasts. A couple of crosses are marked on NOAA’s National Hurricane Centre’s Atlantic map this week. The darker the colour cross, the more serious the weather system predicted. Our rain is a tropical wave passing – and is marked by a yellow cross.

Out in the Atlantic, 700 or so miles southwest of the Cabo Verde islands, there’s a dark orange cross. This means it is ‘conducive for development’. If it forms into a tropical storm, it goes red and circular. A hurricane and it’s red and filled-in. At this point, the Hurricane Hunter goes up and flies right into it. Dramatic or what.

It always amazes me how a large weather system, building in intensity, can be tracked across the whole tropical Atlantic. We are safer here in the ABCs, being south and fairly west, but we’re still watching.

August and September are considered the most dangerous months for the Caribbean hurricane season. Another good reason we tell ourselves, to be tied-up in a marina right now. Even if marina-living is a bit detached from sea-living.

Quest has become a floating apartment. Not so good for spontaneously jumping off the back of the boat and swimming, but great for staying cool inside. And filling dive tanks whenever we want to with shore power. We don’t have to wait for the mornings to run the gennie.

We even have showers in our shower room now. When we arrived, I emptied the forward one from being a towel storage room. It was a false start for the first week though – when the sump pump came on intermittently and occasionally filled up the bilges instead of our little shower draining box.

We called the local chandlery, and they helpfully sent a couple of shower pump switches over while we were quarantine. Presto, shower working again! Well, after Jack spent hours installing a new switch. We did cheer him on though. On a side note, I’m part of a FB group, Women Who Sail, who often have posts about women doing all the fixes on a boat – on their own. This may be my future.

In the meantime, the shower is properly wonderful. It has a bench where we can sit and watch the world go by. While we get clean – using copious amounts of mains water. How will we ever go back to washing on the back transom again? With the little shower head? Questions for when the rain stops.