Project Day in Admeralty Bay Bequia – 20 july

so today the first thing on the agenda was to drop off the propane. i arrived 30 minutes early which was no drama but i was totally taken aback when she said it would be 70 ec per tank! these are little 5kg tanks and 70ec is about $25 so $50 yikes. we really had no choice but i think this was even more expensive than egypt!

back on palapa aimee was finishing up yoga and seites and jen where inviting them selves over for banana smoothies. after a bit of discussion on the “optimal” plan we got on the same page and commenced the smoothy event. of course there where coconuts and machetes involved to add some excitement. as you can see from the photo sequence we managed to get the coconuts open without loosing any limbs or putting any new holes in palapa. however we did manage to get some coconut stains on the deck which still have not some off after a week of rain.

in any case aimee and jen got our blender going and made a couple rounds of smoothies. ver good and healthy just banana coconut water and ice in a blender. you want a medium fresh coconut (see photo) for optimal water quantity! alas we could not back in banana smoothie glory but had a bunch of things to get done. aimee and jen headed off to the market. seitse headed back to waka irie to fix his vhf radio.

i only had fix forward and aft head and replace batteries in the spot check. after quick success with the heads i expected to be on the beach with sietse doing a beer decathlon in no time, how wrong i would turn out to be! the forward one head i finally re-plumbed to the main manifold so it is not constantly emptying the forward tank i cant believer it has taken me 6 years to do this and i cant believe how easy it was. i still remember byron asking if it was ok to just plumb to the forward tank as we where in the crazy 2 week outfit the palapa before the 2006 haha but i digress. the aft head i had recently gone back to salt water on and needed to replace the hose which was not regulation head hose and was collapsing. aimee helped me out with pulling the new hose though and again it went very smoothly.

i was so ahead i thought i would tackle the rub rail that had come loose on the passage from st marteen. i headed over to see if siets was done with his vhf project. he was but when he demoed it to me it was not working. another beer or so later we decided we needed clip leads and a speaker from palapa so headed back to do the rub rail. this turned out to be a major PAIN. sietes did a great job making sure we did not cut any corners or i am sure it would have failed. first he cleaned the rub rail its self while i sprayed the track with wd40. they i cleaned the track after which he re-cleaned it due to my slap dash approach. we then began the process of pulling it down the track. we each had a can of wd 40 and i would push and he would pull on a line tied to another line tied to the end of the rub rail. after an hour or two (with no beer) we finally had to get aimee involved winching the last few meters.

we finally finished with it around happy hour but still had to fix the vhf radio. jen had offered to make us all curry for dinner and had been trying to call aimee to come up with a plan but alas no vhf (did i mention i am a big fan of 2 of everything :)). siets and i headed over to waka iere determined to finish off their vhf. we where able to confirm that in fact the built in speaker was shot and he needed an external speaker. believe it or not neither of us had a simple little speaker but he got it hooked up to his stereo.

we declared victory and called palapa to see what the plan was. there was a bit of confusion because both girls thought we where eating on the others boat but we where instructed to pick up the “curry bag” and return to palapa. we actually had curry roti’s, curry wrapped in a tortilla. the curry was all local root vegetables very good. jen was ecstatic about being able to use a stove that had 3 working burners and did not catch fire (they have an alcohol stove and fires are routine). we made a reasonable “early” night of it as we are going to head south to the famed tobego cays manana.

cheers, roger