Hello again...

Well I'm back. As life has a way of doing, the last few months have flown by. A lot has happened but that if for another time. As for me, I'm on the island of Bonaire now. I ended up going back to California in December and returned to Grenada and the boat at the end of January. As usual there some projects to finish prior to us leaving but since the internet service I'm using right now is sketchy, I will save all the fun details for another blog. For the time being, here's the down and dirty of what I have been up to. We set sail from Grenada on the 3rd of February bound for the offshore islands of Venezuela. We sailed to Los Testigos first, about 88 miles from Grenada and we spent the night on the anchor near Playa Real beach basically in the same spot Boogie was when Jaymie and I stayed there back in July. After some debate we decided on heading to Porlamar on Isla de Margarita. The same place I bought diesel back in July for 6 cents a gallon. We arrived there the next morning and got fuel then headed in to check with one of the yacht agents about the checking in procedures. After finding out how extensive and ridiculous the customs and immigration circus is we decided to just go to the grocery store and then set sail the following morning. Well I typically do fine on my own finding chaos around every corner but when you put Brian and I together, there is always something insane in store. We were told by Marina Juan to take a cab to the store but we decided to walk. Well I don't know if it was my 6 weeks back in the states or what but I wasn't being very heads up as we just kept on walking down a street we shouldn't have been on. As we were approaching the bend in the road that led back to a main street I was grabbed by a guy who was speaking to me in rapid Spanish. I turned and as I was looking at him and trying to decipher what he was yelling about I saw that he was holding a knife. Just a basic small dinner steak type knife. I was still lost as to what was going on when he swiped at the chest strap from my backpack. It finally clicked what he was trying to do. Brian picked up another guy in Grenada as crew while I was gone and he had been walking behind us and was attacked first. They forced his backpack off and one of the guys ran off with it. By the time I realized fully what was going on the guy tried to cut the chest strap again and I grabbed his wrist and shoved him back. I was trying to figure out what to do but I didn't want to take my eyes off the knife and honestly I was kind of just frozen in a stand off with him. I yelled over to Brian because he seemed to be about as stunned and confused as I was and when he heard me he snapped out of it and found a big piece of wood on the ground to swing like a club. He yelled at the guy and after a few moments the dude ran off with the rest of them. None of us are sure how many guys there were, we think 3 or 4 total. Whatever the case, we ran out on to the main street and jumped in a cab. Turned out Sam only had a camera, his drivers license and a debit card in his pack so he was able to cancel that online right away. All in all, we got off pretty lucky. If one of us had been hurt we would have been fucked because we were basically in the country illegally and while we were down in Venezuela we heard that Chavez was on the radio actually encouraging attacks on Americans. Needless to say, we set sail that following morning for Los Roques.





We arrived in Los Roques last Sunday and were planning on spending most of the week sailing around this beautiful area but Monday morning we ran into problems with the Coast Guard guys there so we just ended up bailing completely and heading on to Bonaire. This island is incredible. We have been really enjoying it here and have been hanging out with some of the crew from a yacht that is berthed here. The yacht is called Octopus and belongs to Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. It's 414 feet long, has 2 helicopters, 2 submarines, 7 tenders and all kinds of jet skis and other toys. It has a cinema, gym, basketball court, etc. It holds 224,000 gallons of fuel, about a million and a half dollars to fill up. It operates on a 20 million dollar a year budget. The thing is awesome, check it out on google or wikipedia. The crew members are real cool and are from all over, it's been a blast hanging with them. I'm going to try and post some pics soon but the internet connection is pretty dodgy here so I may have to wait until Curacao. We are staying here until next Thursday night. We will set sail for Curacao that night to make it over by Friday morning. Carnaval starts that following Monday which just happens to be my birthday so I'm sure we will have a good time.