IN A BAY ON EBAY...............................

Someone commented on the yacht in front of us the other day, by calling it " JUST A SLOOP WITH TRAINING WHEELS " .................... So glad the owner wasn't within hearing distance ................. And there certainly are plenty of multihulls around, in fact, we are pretty much surrounded by them ....... ............. Is there a message here? ................ You can certainly slide them much further into the shallow mangroves than a deep-keeled sloop...........But dry storage must be minimal, then again at the speed they travel you only need to carry breakfast, while the rest of us have to carry lunch and dinner .......................



Friends of ours, Harry and Linda, on the catamaran "KUHELA", that fancy one with the red hibiscus flower on the side, have the best of both worlds................ A huge cockpit, twin engines, a salon or saloon (if you're the gunslinger type) that's more like a giant ballroom, and with a foredeck the size of a tennis court, except that the net is horizontal and not vertical........... And you definitely need those 'marriage-saver' headsets to communicate with each other................... "I was wondering where you were, Harry?" ................."Oh, I was in the port side aft-locker wrestling with a battery cable" .........."Why, where were you?"...."Oh, I was reading on the starboard bow seat!".................... The after-deck can certainly support a palm tree or two, more like an entire vegetable plot, with corn on the cob..................In buckets, of course,



Having come up for air, I go below again to wrestle with the stove............. At some point soon, it is going to be attacked with the winch handle................ On the right, are the two extracted "thermocouples"...... (I know a couple is two, so why do they call each one a couple? ...................Never mind)........... After thorough cleaning and re-installation, the stove works once again...........And on the chart table hangs the portable VHF radios, the portable depth sounder, the portable GPS, the portable compass, some flathead and star screw drivers and right there in the top left hand corner is the electric razor...............(no reason for that).......But best of all is the power gauge, showing the batteries being charged by the solar panels and running at 16.66 volts...........Life's not bad at all when four solar panels give you 20 amps.................



Getting back to that EBAY thing................ What a wonderful way of getting bits and pieces when you are miles from anywhere.............Look at this little package all the way from Seattle, Washington......... It's our new self-steering MONITOR gear........ We tracked it with UPS online, all the way across the States till it got to Puerto Rico, and then the trail stopped................ The local UPS agent had quit............ We went to the airport at CULEBRA and there it sat.................Nobody could sign for it, and nobody could give it to us, until UPS could appoint another agent............. Don't ever say that to a sailor.................... Drinks at sunset anyone ?

Oh, and those signs on the point are not " MODERN ART "...............Truth is,.... The Red/white/red one is a line of sight marker (transit) with its mate way back on the other side,(do a double click on the photo to see it).......... And the two crosses are in remembrance of two people in an unlit dinghy that were run over in the night................. Now that's a clear message 'in passing' .................

SHADES OF JURASSIC PARK.................................

They look and behave just like acting 'Dockmasters'...........(full of themselves).......They sit on the edge of the breakwater wall staring at you as you go past in the dinghy, and give you that look that says " Have you paid ?........" and when you get quite close, certainly within 3 feet (1m), they do this mad dash, a double somersault with a twist, and dive into the water, swim to the bottom and then race along underwater at an incredible speed, to emerge somewhere in the mangroves or up another wall.............with a "Did you see me do that awesome dive?".....



We fed one of the iguanas an over-ripe and very wet banana, and after first lifting his (or her,it's still hard to tell) nose in the air, he/she got into it with a vengeance............Wet banana everywhere...............We had to rescue the remnants and feed him/her some more........... It's easy to see how they can easily become domesticated....................They certainly are a work of art, in colour, design and sheer beauty....................Do a double-click on the photos to show you the finesse and finery...........



These iguanas have very extensive neck frills, top and bottom................ We have those too................. Check out the water line on ARITA...............A nice green frill line, notwithstanding that we scrape it every week but with water temperatures in the 80s, the algae grows at an incredible rate...........Perhaps we are in Jurassic Park................A park with a twist (or a twister), because the five day weather prediction shows the birth of a hurricane that's heading past us on its way North-West............... Marvelous technology, that allows us to see what's coming five days in advance, with three hour interval updates, showing cloud cover, rainfall, wind speed, wind direction and barometric pressure gradients and the circular low-pressure that marks the beginning of a 'Big one'............... Note the bottom photo is dated the 25th.............but today is only the 20th...........



Now which is the lure and which is the real squid?......... Both were on deck but one of them must have jumped four feet (1.5m) on a calm night to get there ........... How high would you jump if 'Jaws' was after you?............

ABOVE AND BELOW A SHADY LADY..............

Someone must have blown the whistle on Friday the 13th, because Saturday and Sunday were incredibly beautiful days................Wind down to five knots or less, skies bluer than blue, and cloudless.................What a welcome break from grey..............And we got away in the dinghy to the island of LUIS PENA...........a long, but doable dinghy ride, to go snorkeling to an underwater world, leaving ARITA on the mooring with all the shade covers up.................. Do a double click on the aerial photo and look for "that touch of green" (7th boat from the left) .....................And you will see us anchored far behind the reef that blocks out the ocean swell.................



You have to do a double-click on these photos to see the millions of fish-fingerlings we swam through...............Fearless they were............(Wally is in there somewhere, he's the one with the skew eye)........And there was live coral growing everywhere...............We need to come back to see more.........



And when we came out of the water it took only sixty seconds to make new friends..........Exchange our snorkel gear for some cold drinks and .............Well you know how it goes......................That's Laurie wearing her famous 'Ernesto Berterelli "ALINGHI" cap'..............You can see mainland PUERTO RICO in the distance and when we came back to town we caught up with this Iguana, who is going through an identity crisis, while slowly shedding his skin................



Dr Carlos Selles and his wife Glory have a beautiful 43ft Bavarian sloop, state of the art design, and super sleek and they have previously anchored near us............... This time, they came out to see us in a much smaller vessel, a kayak, together with colleagues, to enjoy a welcome drink of mango rum in a sea-shell (we are going to need more mango rum shortly, supplies are dwindling).................Great to see them again and to share a delightful lunch at "Mamacitas" restaurant................ Carlos took some of the photos, including the great aerial shot as they left on an 8-seater 'fly-in-the-sky' to wing back to the mainland of PR................All of this was yesterday afternoon...............And today it is on our blogsite, compliments of wonderful internet and a wifi antenna somewhere in the hills behind us.................Haven't figured out where yet...........Don't really need to.............We even have a router on board so that I can 'skype' the 'Queen of Florida' in the front cabin, right here from the chart table...............Beats walking three steps.......................

BETWEEN MUNDANE AND INSANE..........................

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....................