Day 75, Year 6 A New Address
Date: Friday, January 7, 2011
Weather: Still Sunny with No Wind, but Cooler
Location: Simon’s Town, Western Cape, South Africa
Windbird moved from the far end of one pier to the far end of another pier this morning. Slip #218 that we have been occupying is owned by a boat that has been on land and will be launched in the next few days needing their space back. So yesterday the boat in Slip #130 went on the hard and this morning we took their place. Carla and Pieter came to catch our lines and the move was uneventful since there is no wind. I did laundry and Mark worked to get our wireless booster working. We could be getting free internet here on the boat if the booster was working, but it has not been and finally he isolated the problem. We need new connectors on the ends of our Ethernet cable but we will have to go into Cape Town to get the new connectors. And right now we are very low on internet time through our cell modem, but we can’t buy that in Simons Town either. We are going to take the bus to the closest town, Fish Hoek, tomorrow morning and see if we can buy cell time there. In the meantime, we have to go up to the Yacht Club to be on the internet. And we have surely spent enough hours there this week. We once again spent the entire afternoon up there searching for places to meet the kids in the Caribbean and we sent them an email with the best that we can find. Finding everything one would like-beachfront, pool, walking distance to town-is just not possible for under $2,500 for 10 days and that was what we have set as our limit. We’ll wait to see what the kids think of the latest list we sent this afternoon and then make a decision. It could be that we will just have to have our reuion once we get back to the US
We heard from Peppe and Bob of Far Niente today and they think they have solved their starter motor problem. So they are hoping to get out of Richard’s Bay as soon as possible. While we have been having beautiful weather here, further north they have had rain and ugly weather with high seas. So we hope things settle out and that Bob and Peppe will get to move at least to Durbin in the next few days. Our friends Pieter and Carla of Odulphus came by today in a new dinghy that they bought from a local. Pieter and Carla have a small, hard dinghy that is wearing out and a local boat was selling a Walker Bay hard dinghy. These are top of the line and the price for this barely used one was just right. A Walker Bay is also a sailing dinghy and Pieter found the mast and sails in St. Francis Bay here in South Africa and they will deliver this to them here. Mark was insanely jealous. He would love to have a light weight sailing dinghy “just for fun” and the Walker Bay would his choice, but we don’t have room for two dinghies and we would never part with our “rubber duck.”
We ended the day sharing a beer with friends at the Yacht Club. It is now time for dinner and Mark is outside grilling chicken. Unfortunately, he has somehow gotten a cold and is feeling a little under the weather. We’ll make our trip into Fish Hoek tomorrow and then spend a low key weekend in hopes that he will recover quickly.
