Day 137, Year 6 Rearranging and Cleaning Continue
Date: Thursday, March 10, 2011
Weather: Cloudy with Periods of Sunshine; Wind N-NE 10-15 knots
Air Temperature: Same, Same Everyday, 74 – 82 degrees F
Location: Prickly Bay, Grenada
You know Mark and I are tired when we decline an offer of a ride to shore for Happy Hour. Howard and Judy called this evening to see if we would like to go ashore with them, but we were both too exhausted to even think about getting off the boat. This spring cleaning thing is just no fun. We can’t understand how there can be so much to do in such a small area. I started the process while on passage, but that was just too hard with all the rolling we were doing. At least now we are somewhat stable here at anchor, but that doesn’t negate the drudgery. While on passage we found that the drawers on the starboard side of the aft cabin (Mark’s clothing storage) were damp and I have had to wash all of his t-shirts and shorts and take out the drawers and wash and sun dry them. That in itself has been a huge chore when you add in the sheets from passage. But we are making progress even though we still have a couple of days of this to go. We’d love to take a break tomorrow and head into St. George’s, BUT the riggers come at 9:30 tomorrow morning and Johnny promised to have the mainsail ready sometime tomorrow. If the mainsail is going to be delivered, we will wait until Saturday morning to go to town, but if not, we might take off as soon as the riggers leave tomorrow morning for our first trip to the big city.
Today Jim Cottle of Cottle Marine Carpentry came to give us an estimate on replacing our teak deck. Mark went there yesterday to find out about getting a small piece of teak to replace our missing Dorade vent top and thought it would be interesting to find out how much a new deck would cost. We thought if it was cheap enough, we might return here in a couple of years and have the work done. Well, it would cost over $20,000 US so we probably won’t be doing that. We’ll just have to repair what we have and make do or remove the teak ourselves and lay a fiberglass deck.
Today our shower head seemed to develop a dripping leak and our Calfrano fan that is DC powered and can be moved from place to place seems to have “partially” died. It works on low but not on high, so that is something else for Mark to check out. That fan is indispensible in really hot weather, but actually it is not all that hot here right now, so we can probably survive without it.
We talked to Mark’s sister Mary Ellen last night and she and Lee will not be coming to Grenada on the 19th with Mark’s brother Steve. They are still going to try and meet us somewhere along the line for a few days, but their priority right now is to be close to Michelle during her recovery. They will not know until next Monday whether or not she will need chemotherapy and if so, when that will begin. So Lee and Mary Ellen are just not comfortable leaving right now and we can’t blame them. But Steve is still coming and we will just have to hope that Lee and Mary Ellen will be able to come for a few days at some point during the month. Michelle was home from the hospital but still pretty groggy last night so we didn’t get to talk to her, but she seems to be doing great.
