Author Archives: Christine

About Christine

The one that makes it all happen

The journey home

Up at dawn, taxi organized by Christine was on time to meet us at 8 am for our 9:45 flight. Christine had packed all our stuff yesterday so only one last trash run and opening up the bilges to let it all air out and we took the long sad walk off the dock.

Leaving is always so sad, but we’ll be back soon enough.

Turbo prop to San Juan to clear customs, then to Miami, then to Dallas and finally on to Austin and we’ll be home for the first time this year. Gotta get back to work to earn some more vacation time and get back to St Lucia and move the boat back south before hurricane season of 2012.

Dead Ants

The downside of storing your boat on the hard is that critters can easily come aboard and stowaway if they so desire. The yard in Trinidad had some ants that we noticed when we dropped the boat off but they paced some plastic between the lumber the boat was sitting on and the boat but I guess that’s not enough.

We had lots of tiny black sugar type ants on board and we tried all kinds of things to get rid of them on our trip, sprays, powders, etc. Every store we went in we looked for a fumigator or bug bomb without any luck. One night we had a decent Internet connection so I consulted the almighty oracle that is google and found some interesting ideas.

Mixing sugar and boric acid seemed to be a good option and we had both of those on board already. The two powders together didn’t do much so I put some water in there and made a syrup and in no time those little (pests) came out and devoured their little ant cocktail.

2 days later all peace was restored on board. The only problem was that we put up with those little (pests) for 2 weeks before we found a solution that worked.

Pests is in parenthesis because the real explicative used might not be appropriate here.

I was so inclined yesterday when I found a couple when cleaning that I mixed a fresh cocktail and placed it in one of the cockpit storage area just for good measure and since the adults were having their own cocktails, I figured if there any ants left they too should enjoy a cocktail.

Busy couple of days

Cleaning and putting the boat away.

Arrived pretty early on he 2nd of January and floated next to the fuel dock for an hour or two waiting on LeGrande or Yellow Pearl from a few posts ago to move out of the way. A monohull rated up to the pearl to get fuel. And when they left it was our turn but the yellow pearl simply moved forward so we went in behind her only to be told that that was the duty free fuel and since we had already cleared into the country we needed the pump where the pearl was parked so we had to back off and wait on them to finish the pictures that they were taking. Of course that means another parking adventure. We get all set and fuel up. In the last year or tyne trip to Trinidad and back we used almost as much feud le as we did crossing the Atlantic. That means we motored a lot this year, we took just under 100 gallons to top off the tanks.

And of course polishing off all food and drink on board that has become the painful flight day tradition.