Author Archives: Matt

What do you do ALL day?

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To put it simply, we do every day tasks and chores that take all day.   Part is exploring, part is accomplishing, and part is failure.

Between he sunsets we forage

Exploring, that fine art of looking to see what resources are where and when they are available, it involves wandering around or taking busses, or taxi or renting a car if necessary.   We will wander through every grocery store or convenience store we see and walk the isles looking for the “unobtanium“.  The  hard part becomes remembering what you saw and WHERE you saw it, when it becomes and item on the list, grocery or boat task.  Also talking to other cruisers on the shopping bus and the perpetual happy hour to share what has been learned in the short amount of time we have amassed on the island.

Accomplishing, the fine art of knocking something off “the list”   The list always grows and order of precedence changes daily based on availability and level of need.  Grocery runs become easier the longer you stay in the same spot as you know what you will find, assuming you can remember where you exploration took you.    

Failure, when seemingly easy tasks don’t get completed during the desired period of time.  Today for example, we had done the exploration and talked to lots of folks who seemed to know what they were talking about.  Our thought for today’s mission was to fill up a propane tank that had recently run out, a couple days ago.  Not to worry we have a backup 20 pounder and lots of 5 and 7 pounders as backups.   

Exploration was on the internet and noon site – where it says to contact Propane Paul and he will get it done for you, even delivers to your boat.  Contact info had a phone number – Great call that…Oops, out of minutes on the Digicel voice – okay no issues, a top up is in order.   Can do that online, but our data plan was fubar – luckily we have a backup to that when on the boat and used the Sugar Shack WiFi which ain’t too bad, 5Gb up and down in the middle of the night, not so great during the day tho.   We managed to get a top up of minutes and make the call.   “Cellular customer you are trying to reach is out of the area or has phone turned off”  – Great an hour plus spent trying to figure out the TopUp procedure for not, failure.   Contact option #2, Paul is on a boat in the bay and picks up at the local sailing center.  Dinghy ride it is.  Dinghy on over, start asking questions, get directed to his house, spot his boat on the way – no one home.  Talk the neighbor on the dock and learn that Paul is out delivering a boat to Europe and won’t be back for a while, and not sure if he is doing the propane thing any more.   Failure again.   Over the course of several shopping buses we chatted with other cruisers who were looking for LPG but wanted it filled in their European bottles.   And they had said the gas station on the bus route will fill them for them if they had the correct fitting.  So on our walk about on the Apple Mission, we stopped in a Kooyman – local HomeDepot but clean and shinny with great customer service.  Low and behold they sold american style propane tanks to go with the bbqs, so we asked 2 different folks if we needed an adapter for our american 20lb tanks.  Of course we got a different answer than I had just got when asking a guy on the street who was selling food out of food truck with propane, he said we needed an adapter Kooyman said no – just go to the gas station.   Filled with doubt and full of hope, we tasked Saturday with filling the Propane because what else do we have to do this morning.

Jumped on the shopping bus, asked Angelo to stop early at the gas station so we wouldn’t have to carry the empty bottle that far.   Perfect, we roll up the ladies in the cage, we ask about propane, I show her the bottle.  And then it starts…the shaking of the head.  Uh-Oh – not a good sign.   She says we need to go to the place next to the KFC in Santa Rosa, uh?  How do we get there, she says hold on, closes the small window and eventually says it’s 2 bus rides to get there.   Hmm.. Decision time, we can walk back and catch the shopping bus back to the boat, or continue on this quest.   Continue gets the nod, out comes Maps.Me again.  We search for KFC and low and behold it comes up.  Only 2.3 miles away.  Now walk or take the bus to downtown and then a 2nd bus to Santa Marta.  Walk got the nod.   Luckily its the empty tank and we’ll take the 2 buses on the way back for sure.  Battery running low on iPhone we spot the KFC and shortly the CurOil where this magical propane tank is.  So close to success.   Spot the other locals getting tanks filled, ask what the process is, and learn you have to pay first.  I again show the lady behind the window the tank and the american valve, and almost immediately she starts to shake her head.    What I just carried this tank over 2 miles and there is an issue?  Another attendant came over and explained the machine for our valve is not working, and mentioned that the one that is working is on the other side of town, another 2 bus rides away.   Ugh, so I ask when will their machine will be fixed, and he levels with me and said its been broken for over a year.   

At least its a light propane tank to lug around for miles

Well then, beat hot and tired of all this walking and exploring the past week, we catch a mini bus – the ones that change the prices based on the way they feel.   We asked the locals on the bus what it cost, but when we went to get off and pay that amount we had to add and extra Naf each, for the same route – oh to add insult to injury we arrived at 10:02am at the main bus station and our bus left at 10 and next one at 11am.  We made the most of it, went to the fresh fruit market and scored some deliciousness fresh from Venezuela for a 10Naf, or about $5 USD.

Yum fresh from Venezuela.

Yum fresh from Venezuela.

Back to the boat to watch the windsurfers and sailing class enjoy the gusts to 30 knots in the anchorage.   

Youth sailing practice.

Windsurfers enjoying the breeze

The Apple Mission

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On every corner in the states there is a Starbucks and an Apple iSomething store or at least a store that gives you the ability to peruse apple products.   Before we left, I upgraded my 2009 MacBook Pro to the latest and greatest 2016 MacBookPro with all the bells and whistles.  That of course means a bazillion adapters to accomodate for the new USB-C connectors.   All has been working swimmingly with the new MacBook Pro…until it wasn’t.

Less than 6 months old, and the charging brick gives out, now I can’t charge my laptop at all, its down to 30% and when that is over, no dice.  I have the 2009 as a backup, and it works, just a bit slower.  This computer has 12volt and 110volt chargers.  Of course the new computer has completely different connectors and I haven’t located a 12volt charger for it yet.  Ugh.

Today’s mission find one of these.

Google said there is a iCurraco on the island and its close to the places we have already walked and wandered by.  So that was the destination.  Take the bus to downtown and go to Digicel first to figure out what happened to our data (for some reason they stopped giving us data at 5gb instead of the 18gb we purchased).  That in itself was fun, standing in line for a while only to be told, she sent an email to the support team and would call us back when it was fixed.  Uhhh..  I walked all the way to your store for this?  No expectations, so we wandered around and turned on the phone never believing they would call, but within 15mins the call came in stating it was all fixed, and sure enough the missing 14gb were credited back to our account.

Google Maps, its an android device after all, was now in business and we were off, 3km walk through town, over to Otrobanda, to the supposed location of iCuracao.   Nothing but a home there, a secondary search returned another location another 4km away which was also incorrect.  Switch to the Maps.me app on the iPhone.  This map gave us a new location, in another direction of course.  So what else do we have to do, keep walking stopping at every convenience store for a cold “small beer” to keep the legs moving, and hydration in balance.    We get close, and it looks like we are to walk down the “Ring” highway, so we jump the guardrail between cars, following some local kids and make it across.   Turns out to be a shopping mecca with hardware stores, house wares, and supermarkets and low and behold an iWorld store.

Not expecting to actually find the charger, can’t have your hopes up too high when dealing with bleeding edge technology.  But low and behold they had three for the 13 inch and 2 for the 15 inch MacBookPros.  Oh my, I’ll take that one and it was only 10% more than what they cost in the states, score!    

Success: MacBookPro gets a second chance at life with a new charger.

On the way back to the bus stop, we came across a Kooyman and had to stop in to look around.  One, it was air conditioned, and two it is a really awesome store.

Megastore Kooyman

Megastore Kooyman

Well now to get back, at least to our bus route that is, quick check of the Maps.Me showed we had another 3 kilometers to get to a bus stop on our route.  We pushed on and went straight to the bar “ItsLit” where we had stopped the other day, and thought there was a happy hour at 5pm, course it didn’t start till 7pm – Doh, we had drinks anyway after a well deserved successful mission.

Oh and we found me some new tennis shoes for hiking if need be as the Sperry shoes I used to own, disintegrated during the Antigua Race week.

Quinton had showed us the Bus Schedule app where you can see where the buses are so at the last minute we paid our tab, and made the last few mins of Happy Hour at Pirates (again).

After I had made Christine walk all over the place, she wanted pork chops and smashers for dinner, so that’s what we had.   Concluded a good long day…

Vacation in Galveston

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Who knew Galveston was a vacation destination?  All those years of living a 3 hr drive to Galveston and its now a 12+ hour airplane ride to where we would spend our first vacation from vacation.

Freezer burn and frigerator burn are the two biggest electrical draws we have on board – not counting the water maker as we only run that every few days.  The fridge and freezer burn the most electricity as they are always on.  Yeah, I know you’d think the internet was always on and sucking down bits and bytes – but that doesn’t compare to the electricity used to keep beer cold.  Yeah, I’m a prima donna.    

As we were going to be leaving for a few days, and even though the weather forecast looked light we needed to make a plan on where to leave our home while we traveled back to Texas even for a short weekend.  Seeing as we had pretty much depleted the frozen meats, those pork chops from Grenada had seen better days after almost 4 months in the freezer and going through 2 defrost cycles.  We were going to be leaving the boat on the hook, at anchor out in the bay and relying on solar to keep the electrical in balance and the hook to stay  stuck while we were away.   We had worked it out, to where there was basically only ice in the freezer and one last bit of shrimp which we had for dinner, the plan was to turn off the freezer while we were gone and thus remove one of the larger power suckers while we were away.

Our friends had agreed to keep an eye on the shack and also to give us a lift to land so that the dinghy wasn’t tied to dinghy dock for 4 days and nights.  That was so awesome, and then they also picked us up at the bar when we arrived as well.  Too cool.

The wind was forecast to be light but also shifting 180 degrees from the direction we anchored in.  We had found our normal spot, next to the beach, we set the hook and were comfortable, dove on the anchor it was set, but then thought about it.  Maybe we should anchor further out away from shore, get more swing room – we don’t need to hog the prime spot while we are not here, so we picked up the hook and moved further out.  Found a spot with lots of swing room, till someone anchored next to us later in the day – but they didn’t look like they were going to stay.  You can just sense these things sometimes.  Dove on the anchor it was buried in sand again.  Let out lots of scope and that’s where we would leave it.

Sugar Shack

Can you spot the shack in the middle of the pack?

Moved some of the last things in the freezer to the fridge after dinner and shut down the freezer.  5 am came pretty early, at 6 am our ride showed up, shuttled us to shore and we set off looking for a bus or taxi to the airport.  Was it too early, the roads were empty, we had an 8am departure, sure we could walk it and be there by 7am with the luggage.   Then a yellow school bus honked slowed and asked if we needed a lift to the airport. Christine and I looked at each other and said.. uh sure, okay.  We jumped on the school bus.  This guy knew his route and that school bus cornered like it was on rails – to borrow a line from Pretty Woman.  Honk Honk, what speed bump, wowzers how did we make that corner.  Was an E-ticket ride for sure, never came to a complete stop to pick up the passengers, and grinned when it was boys as he made it extra challenging for them – everyone seemed to enjoy the challenge too.

At the airport we got our tickets and settled in for a long day of travel to the north side of Houston, where we picked up a rental car and traveled across Houston in rush hour traffic,  After moving at 10miles and hour for 4 months – driving 80mph in Houston, in a strange vehicle was quite the experience.  2 hrs later after a stop at williams-sonoma for some cooking gear we finally made to Galveston and the vacation / celebration could commence.

La Semanna

Baie Longue, La Semanna – favorite stretch of beach on a good weather day.