NERVE WRACKING ..............................................

The travel-lift operator laughs at Laurie and says something in Spanish, which probably means " Now I see two asses up in the air!" ............. Easy for him to say .......... He gets paid, regardless ...............And with his home-made dust mask and sunglasses on, I won't know who he is, even if he drops all 16 ton of ARITA ............ The process is nerve-wracking, and while the travel-lift only moves at 2mph, it only prolongs the anxiety ............... But she sure looks beautiful again .................. Just have to add that last touch of anti-fouling under the keel, where I couldn't get to it before ...............



........................................... JUST HANGING OUT WITH THE LOCALS IN THE BOATYARD .................



And ARITA is launched back into her element and just in the nick of time too, before the Heavens open up and the downpour begins, as we head back to CULEBRA in the Spanish Virgin Islands ............A passage of 18 miles in pretty boisterous seas ............



Despite the rain and the howling wind, we do just fine ..................Only two waves come right across the cabin top ................ The magic lies in the chartplotter (and you may need to double-click on this, to enlarge it) .......... The red line is our projected course over the ground, The black circle is our changing position and the dash brown line is the direction of the ARITA's bow ..... The black line with dots is our previous track, and the red and green flash marks are marker buoys, for the deep water channel between the reefs ............. And of course the depth is shown everywhere in feet......... Real cool, and you can do this in the dark just as well, or in the rain ...............And now that we have a clean bottom and a shiny new propeller, we do much more than 6.8 knots ............ Nice, very nice ...........



So now we are finally back on course for our " IN SEARCH OF PALMS ", as this little carved scroll attached to the side of the salon shows......................Ready to head further south and East, to new places and new islands ....... PUERTO RICO and the other VIRGIN ISLANDS have been exceptional, and so have the people we have met ................And each day has brought us new surprises, like this guy peeling oranges outside the FAJARDO ferry terminal .............. Take a look at the engineering involved in peeling an orange ............... We bought two just to see if they tasted different .............. They didn't, but they sure looked good ......



But in the five months that we've spent in and around P.R. and the Virgins, we have found pelicans everywhere and feeding in frenzies ............... Dive bombing in masses, and invariably you have to look up and say "What was that", only to see a pelican slowly lift his head and beak as 'out goes the water, and the fish stays' ............. In one place we watched them hold their beaks open underwater till the fish simply swam in ............ That's like eating dinner straight off the shelves in a supermarket .... Look near the shore line, and you will see the dark colouring in the water....... This is the huge school of bait fish and fingerlings ...............





The down-side to the pelicans is that we share the same stretch of water ............ Us for anchoring, them for fishing and eating ............. And their contribution to the World's guano supply invariable ends up on our deck ............. Small price to pay for being in this beautiful environment .....................As for the macaws we saw behind the 'Iron Curtain' in the Marina, ................Well, what can we say ................." FREE MAC AND FRIENDS" .............Or at least give them a larger enclosure with a little flying room and a nook and cranny, a little privacy for some courtship ...............