Sometimes planets align in a favorable way, sometimes not.

Upon a mid-January arrival at Jupiter in Roche Harbor the crew cranks up the boat’s heaters of the electric kind and the diesel kind to warm air and water and to craft habitable environs aboard. Bags are unloaded, boxes unpacked, and gear stowed. A shower before dinner seems in order.

One crew is soaped up and singing, when the steamy flow slows from soaker to slender seep in tight time, then stops with a final tear-like drop. Shivering shrieks for a remedy from the shower to the engineer come to naught, and a night aboard without water becomes gloomy reality.

Both water pumps aboard are humping and thumping, but no water can be sucked or thrust, primed or combined to the usable side of the system. Two buckets, three bowls, and a pot are deployed to carry water aboard from an icy dockside spigot, sorted for flushing and brushing, washing and drinking and galley-sink sinking.

As this sorry incident is being logged it becomes apparent that on the same date in the same slip precisely one year prior the crew are also denied water aboard Jupiter. Different cause, same effect; planets similarly arrayed. On that occasion we decamped to the nearby hotel, but this time no-one answers the call for a frowzled bed.

The morning brings hydraulic technicians, Nick and Noah, and Jupiter’s WillyVac is employed in a not-so-quick fix. Gratitude, like the vessel’s fresh water, issues forth.

When earth has orbited sun a year hence, we will strive to align with different planets under different constellations on January 17th, a date that shall forever live in infamy aboard Jupiter.