Day 135, Year 6 Making More Progress
Date: Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Weather: Beautiful, Sunny Day; Wind NE 10 knots
Air Temperature: 74 degrees F overnight; 82 degrees F daytime
Location: Prickly Bay, Grenada
The focal point of today was getting the riggers on the boat and getting an estimate on what needs to be done. Two men from Turbulence came out and did the assessment. A young guy went up the mast and inspected all the rigging and came back down saying that all is fine except for the aft and forward lowers. Both aft stays are terribly frayed, but he said all four need replacing. Tomorrow morning we will get the estimate and go from there. But since there is no other show in town, we will have to go with whatever the estimate says.
The rest of the day was all about cleaning-cleaning the waterline, doing laundry, and starting to reshuffle storage of items below-and about catching up on land-based email. Cleaning the waterline is grueling work as you can’t use anything but a soft cloth diaper to scrub. If we could use a scrubby pad it would be so much easier, but that would ruin the AlwGrip paint finish, so we just have to rub and rub and rub which is really hard on the arms. I worked on the whole port side of the boat and did the back and front of the starboard side. Then Mark took over and finished the middle. But everything needs to be done again and again. It is an ongoing process, but it sure looks better than it did.
While I did the bulk of the cleaning, Mark was working on downloading our land-based email and we haven’t been able to access for the past month. It was delightful to hear that Jay and Jodi Stroud from Australia had a baby girl named Willow Summer Stroud. Jay and Jodi are a young couple that we met during Sail Indonesia. It was Jay who said to us on Christmas Eve 2009 in Nai Harn Bay, Thailand, that he was glad to see us “growing old disgracefully.” Those of us from Scot Free II, Shirena, Sea Bunny, Truest Passion, Street Legal, and Windbird were all decked out in Thai headdress and sunglasses with flashing lights. We probably did look “disgraceful” but we were having a great time. We send hearty congratulations to Jodi, Jay, and baby Willow. We also heard from our “resident” orthopedic surgeon and friend back in Concord, NH, Paul Urbanek. Paul read our logs when I had my broken leg back in 2006 and sent very helpful and critical information to me via email. He and his family just spent the last week chartering in Vieques and Culebra in Puerto Rico and we can’t wait to exchange emails about their experience there. It will be most helpful in our upcoming visit in April. There were emails from friends and family we haven’t heard from in ages. We got emails from my cousin Sidney who I haven’t been in contact with for ages, Laurie Haney and Lucille Watt from my days in the Concord School system, good friends Jim and Teresa Spiegel, Bob and Beth Lux from the Concord Yacht Club who circumnavigated in the 1980’s, and on and on. And we got video of our grandbaby Ziggy jumping on a trampoline-far from the baby we left behind in the fall of 2009. It was great fun to read through these emails and see the photos and videos. It made us very anxious to get home and reconnect personally.
We ended the day with a trip to Prickly Bay Marina where we found a shady spot and set up a chair where I could cut Mark’s hair. We then moved to the tiki bar for Happy Hour and Howard and Judy from Laelia joined us. They had taken a walk to find a couple of restaurants recommended in the cruising guides. They were successful in their search and were able to make recommendations for future lunch or dinner possibilities. We enjoyed our Happy Hour time and then returned to Windbird.
We are awaiting word from Mark’s sister on how Michelle’s surgery went today. We did hear from Mark’s brother Steve and he had very good news. There was no cancer found in the lymph nodes surrounding the breast area. But Steve also said that he think Mary Ellen and Lee will not be coming to Grenada but might be joining us for a week in St. Martin. Steve will still come to Grenada and sail to St. Martin with us and we will just have to pack a whole lot of fun into the one week when Mary Ellen, Lee, and sister Jeanie will join us.
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| 110308 Day 135 Grenada–Frayed Rigging & Hair Cut |
