Monday, July 4, 2016

Just hanging out in Grenada

I am working on Part II of the food post. Should be done soon. Just wanted to ramble on a bit and work off some of this tea induced chat. Deb refuses to participate.

Yesterday I was full of energy for some reason and ripped off a few projects and maintenance items. One of those was getting squid ink off the hull. Turns out there are a lot of squid in this bay and the fish love them. They get chased and jump in our boat while leaving an ink trail. We have had at least six squid and various fish lying about some mornings. The squid stick to the deck and the ink is hard to remove. Pain in the ass.



Our boat bottom is getting trashed again. Boy did I pick the wrong paint. We are looking for a diver to clean her up. I can't possibly snorkel 6 feet down and hold my breath long enough to manage to scrape much of anything so don't berate me for not doing it myself. I cleaned up the waterline and down a foot or two. The diver can do the rest. I plan on getting my divers cert next season in Carriacou. I then hope to keep our bottom nice and tidy in the near future.

What else is going on? Not much really. Just hanging out and relaxing until we get our window to jump to Trini. I have re-bed a few opening ports in between rain showers. I have four more to do. These take a while because the bonehead before me used silicone and I have to scrape it all off and then seal it with epoxy. Yes this does work if done correctly and I use Butyl tape. I did these ports years ago with 4200 and it was a fail, but the tape is working fine.

Our radio problems have been solved. No more static buzz. New cable installed. Admitting to being a moron at times, I will say to remember to set your radio to international frequencies when leaving the US. Such a dufus. We did have a bad section of cable where it connects to the mast section with a coupler.

We are cleaning up some of the areas in the boat. Food storage has shrunk now that we are in a place where we can shop every week. I do not need to buy 10 cans of veggies to get through the next month. We are also looking at all the stuff we accumulated and re-evaluating it's need. We have a very lean ship so this should not take too long. I want to get to the point where the V-berth is open for guests or a man cave. A man cave would be awesome and is totally required for sanity reasons. No really. A man cave will solve all kinds of issues that come up. Forget to refill the toilet paper holder and you are now getting the stink eye? Fall into the man cave and play a little guitar, maybe pour a drink or watch a movie, read a book or take a nap. Sure beats the stink eye ;)

So yesterday we hear this hideous noise and we run to the stern only to see the channel marker poking through our swim ladder. Huh?! I thought we were a little too close to that thing! Wish we took a photo of it poking through the ladder but I figured we better focus on freeing the boat first. When we anchored we were about 10 ft away from the thing but we stretched the chain and probably dug the anchor in a bit more in the last blow so now we go over it sometimes if we are really stretched out. I pulled us up some with the snubber.



Always something.

I have finally gone through my craft/good beer stash. I think. I thought I finished it up weeks ago but found some good brews hidden with the emergency medical kits. Makes you wonder where else I have some hidden. You should have seen my face when I found them. Made me forget all about the gash I had in my finger. It was like Christmas!



Cheers!
PJB
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