Happy Baby Day

I know it's been a while since I post so here you go. I typed this on Saturday on the sail back from Trinidad. I have been anchored in Mt. Hartman since that night and now I'm back in my "home base" Prickly Bay. Enjoy.

Hey friends, Chaos here. So since my last post I have been busting ass incessantly. Things have been going well and as usual my days are full of learning new things about the boat, trying to track down parts and meeting crazy characters along the way. Earlier this week my new buddy Fabian and I sailed down to Trinidad to get some parts and have some repairs done. I needed to get the refrigeration and oven worked on as well as try and find some spare parts and after finding a good weather window we set sail on Monday night leaving his boat Vaza Vezo, in the care of some other English "birds" (chicks) we met who are down in Grenada doing research on lobsters. We had a terrific sail with almost no swell at all. Good wind and a light current made it a nice 14 hour sail for us to make our landfall in Chaguramas at 11 AM on Tuesday morning. This port is wild. Chaguramas is a major yachting port, think of it like the end of the line for the cruisers who run down the Eastern Carribean chain. There are countless boatyards and services available and almost any part or type of work you need you can find. Many of the seasonal cruisers end their season here, haul out, leave the boat on the hard in a yard until the end of the year when they fly back, launch the boat and sail North to start all over again. The anchorage sucks. It is mostly moorings that you have to take and there seems to be no wind and no real pattern as to how the boat swings. So I spent much of the first few days constantly coming out to the boat to make sure it wasn’t banging up against another. It is also pretty much an industrial port so you couldn’t pay me to jump in that water which blows because of the humidity.

After clearing into customs and immigration, Fabian and I were off to start our part hunting. We spent most of the first day tracking down parts in several places, getting prices, and arranging appointments for the repairs I needed. First on my list was to get the damn windlass fixed. Without boring you to death, basically the windlass is the machine on the front of the boat that hoist the anchor and chain up. When it fails you get to do it by hand. Since the chain I had on the boat was a complete rust ball, everytime I hoist the chain by hand, the foredeck turns into a greasy, rusty mess and I spend an hour trying to clean up. So after sorting out for the motor to be repaired I was off to buy new chain. I got the new chain on Friday morning, took out the rusty shit and loaded 200 feet of shiny new chain. It’s funny what gets me excited these days. So the windlass and the chain is finally F ing fixed. I was so happy I just sat on the front and stared at it for awhile like a kid on x-mas that can’t believe how cool his new toy is. Next up was the fridge/freezer. On this boat, I have a small fridge on board and a large double freezer unit. The small fridge hasn’t worked since I’ve been on the boat and it has been bugging me so I finally got that fixed. The other one works well but I have to run the motor or the generator in order to run the compressor and cool it down. Since I don’t keep a ton of stuff cold for me, the small one works better and I can save diesel fuel and wear and tear on the engines. After those two, I have been wanting to convert all the lights on the boat to LED and I was able to find about half of them in Trinidad. I will probably have to order the rest online but it is a good start. The benefit here is that they use a tiny fraction of the power that the normal lights consume. Again, this translates to less need for charging the batteries with the generator. I know you all must be just enthralled reading all this but hey, I’m excited about getting it done so deal with it. Pretty much the whole time down there we took care of stuff like this.

Trinidad itself is a beautiful island. Lush and green, filled with natural parks and rain forests. The whole time there as we walked around the bay we were dodging huge iguanas and the occasional caiman crocodile out sunning themselves. You awaken in some of the bays to the screams of the Howler Monkeys in the trees and in Chaguramas bay the entire coastline seems to never cease the work on the boats both small and large. Fabian was there last year and had made some friends so we were able to borrow a car and run some errands in town. The city of Port of Spain is a pretty rough place right now. The paper this morning reported that the current murder stats were at 300 for the year. Apparently there is some heavy gang/drug related activity here. Chaguramas is safe though and we had absolutely no problems during our stay. Fabian was there for 2 months last year and said it was great. It is very humid and you sweat all day and most of the night. Rain storms come blasting through often and if you are lucky enough to be halfway up the highway on foot or in the dinghy in the bay you can be sure of a good shower.

Last Wed was Fabian’s birthday and after doing our chores all day, we went over to a nearby bar to get some dinner and play pool. Originally we were going to go into POS with Danny, one of the local fiberglass guys who is a super cool rastafari who was a great hook up the whole time we were there and saved us both several hundred dollars. He wanted to take us into downtown to meet some of the local Trinidadian chicks but Fabian and I worked too late and missed Danny at the bar. So we ordered up some beers and they were grilling swordfish and doing local kebabs. We ate a ridiculous amount of great food and kept plowing through the local beer, Stag. Around midnight and our 6th or so game of pool, Fabian made buddies with a group of Venezuelan fishermen who were getting smashed in the bar. I told them in Spanish that it was his birthday and they started singing like proper drunken Venezuelan pirates. First they tried in English and instead of happy birthday they were singing happy baby day. It was awesome. Pretty soon we were the focal point of the entire place and a bottle of Jack Daniels found it’s way to the table and you can imagine what happened from there. Now Fabian speaks French, some Thai, and some dialects from Madagascar but my Spanish is better than his so we spent a few hours doing our best to shoot the shit with these boys. They were way cool and we had a blast. We definitely went out in a bizarre rockstar fashion that night and right before we left it occurred to us that our bill might be out of control. When she brought it over we couldn’t believe it. It was 186 dollars. Trinidadian/Tobago dollars to be exact, known locally as T/T dollars. The exchange rate for T/T to U.S. is 6 to 1. So our bill was 31 dollars U.S. For 6 hours of drinking, playing pool, eating a great meal and doing endless shots with our new fishing buddies. Trinidad is cool. Of course, the next day we were both hurting a bit but we gutted it out and started early in the morning and continued to accomplish a lot. We made lots of good friends in the short time we were there and managed to be very productive and have a great time. We set sail today at 10 AM after I went into town one more time to pick up two small solar panels. I managed to find a couple of panels that were reasonably priced and will hopefully boost my charging cycles on the boat.

I’m typing this as we are sailing to Grenada. We are 24 nautical miles from Prickly Bay right now with about 15 knots of wind from the East and we are running about 4 knots just cruising along. It’s beautiful right now and the sun has just slipped under the horizon. Our night watches will start soon and we should make the bay no later than midnight. I couldn’t be better right now and Fabian and I have been working out some details in regards to chartering the boats. His boat has two dive compressors, 16 dive tanks and will be soon outfitted with kite boards for kite surfing. We are thinking about partnering up and when we return he will be certifying me in diving and we will continue to help each other make the boats even better than they already are. So start saving up for your next vacation. Whether you want to come down and learn to dive, hike into rainforests to find monkeys, see prehistoric turtles lay eggs on a moonlit beach or just sit on the boat in a beautiful anchorage listening to Otis Redding and sip rum all day, we will get you there. Check out http://www.fabsafaris.co.uk/ that is his website and I will soon have a similar one for Rum Boogie. Cruise through his site and it will give you an idea of what I want to accomplish with this boat. Hope you are all well and congratulations to Ron and Laurel Peterson on their healthy new baby girl Alexandria.