Somewhere there is 'THAT FINE LINE' that separates the two ................ The more we speak to the various sailors and cruisers the more we discover that it is not the love of sailing as much as it was the dislike of something else, that sets them on this chosen path .................... Take Captain Lucy as an example (Photo on the right)...... She was a run-away mixed-breed potcake who now regularly jumps ship at night to swim to shore, more than a quarter of a mile, while crewman John looks everywhere on the island till he finds her again............ Then they happily sail everywhere (John does have a bigger boat)..............Or take our propane stove as an example....... One day the burner will not stay alight..............Make phonecalls to Canada, totally strip the mechanisms, only to discover that it operates with a 'thermocouple' a micro-tip made of two metals that give off a minute amount of electricity when heated together............And you probably thought that a 'thermocouple' was a pair of red-hot lovers....................Anyway, corrosion is the culprit and after a better connection is made the stove works again..................This only took two weeks to figure out............... That job bordered on THAT FINE LINE................
This is "THE DINGHY DOCK RESTAURANT", about a foot above the water, and should a serious hurricane hit this area, the restaurant will have moved into the hills in bits and pieces..................And below is "John", (another John) a really brilliant guy, a computer 'guru', who carries on board his yacht, hard-drives, motherboards, wifi antennas and everything to build and make computers work.................John was a very successful commodity broker with his office in the World Trade Centre Towers, where he looked down on all the yachts merging from Newport, Rhode Island on the one side, with those from the Great Lakes and the Hudson River on the other..................And just like that, one day he took early retirement...........Very early retirement..........His partners said "John, you're insane" and he said " No, this is mundane.....I'm out of here,.......Buying a yacht and going sailing"..........And he can live to tell about it (no pun intended)...........
Culebra has a unique high school that looks brand new............An 'Ecological High School'...................It even has extensive solar panels on the roof and out in front sits this emergency water tank...........Don't know the full story till school starts again.....................Now putting ecology aside, we do know that every Friday a refrigerated truck arrives from the mainland on the ferry, and runs " THE FARMER'S MARKET".................Most of the produce comes from the U.S. and is the same as in any other supermarket...............So much for the 'Farmers'......
The sailing life is much harder on women than on men................ The transitions are more profound.............Girl 'get-togethers' are a must............. One of the ladies had mentioned that she was missing her dog.............. Well, 'Computer John' also known as 'Balloon John' quickly came to the rescue to create a poodle for her................. This was one of John's many skills in "How to keep kids quiet on an airplane"...............Nowadays, on a plane, when a balloon pops everybody dives under their seat and has a heart-attack...............
There are lots of single men out sailing, and most appear to be in their 50s and 60s..................... And this was one of them, Richard Kriss.................. He has been sailing on 'Little Wing' for more than 40 years......... Interestingly, he has the original "Blondie Hasler' self-steering gear mounted on the stern, which was prototyped in the early 1960s in the first single-handed trans-Atlantic race and from which all later designs were copied...................... We have just bought one ourselves..........Details later, when UPS delivers it to the Dinghy Dock Restaurant, our new home-away-from-home address...........Just a street name, no number and a postcode 00775
Fierce lightning storms and squalls are the order of the day, as the hurricane season marches into mid-August and the heat becomes harder to cope with............. 'Don't you just love sweat running down the crack of your a......"...........And over to the side is one of the yachts still tied to a mooring......................Yes, those are pieces of plywood nailed over the holes in the hull (Do a double-click on this one for a real eye-full)................. We have this expression on board now............ One of us will ask " What are you doing?"....... and the other will answer " Waiting for Tuesday'........................No real reason for that,........ Just a saying,.................Something somewhere between totally mundane and totally insane....................
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