Feb 1
I realized last night that I forgot to mention an important thing we did yesterday. Barb noticed a couple of months ago that Bimmy (the cat) has turned into a drinking and pissing machine. We use clumping litter, so it's easy to tell how many times he goes. She felt that he was now going as much in two days as he used to go in a week. The medical school here in Grenada is also a veterinary school and they have a clinic. So, we loaded the beast into his carrier and took him in for an exam. We only waited a few minutes before we were taken to an exam room, where a student started taking his history and giving him a basic exam. After a few minutes a real doctor, who has a practice in Chicago and is here for a couple of months teaching, came in to see what the student had learned. They determined that he seemed to be in good shape for his age, but given our description about his peeing, he should have some tests. Ever wonder how you get a cat to give you a urine sample? You don't. You just take it. They rolled him over on his back, poked around with their fingers to locate his bladder, and then poked a long needle right into it to extract some urine. The student actually did the poking after the doctor verified where she was going. It was her first time to do that, but it went perfectly. Then they had to draw blood. The doctor did that himself. They draw it from the arm, and the cat didn't care for this part at all. Unlike in the States where we would now have to wait a day or two for results, we waited about an hour and had our answers. (They apologized that it took an hour.) The answer was that he is starting to show signs of kidney failure, which is common in older cats. But, since we noticed the change in his behavior so early, simply changing his diet to a prescription food should slow the kidney deterioration and he should be good for many more years.
On to today's events. This is shopping day, and the bus took a group of about a dozen to the mall at 10:00 as usual. About 11:00, we headed to town to do our own shopping and have lunch. We stopped first at the computer store to drop off one of Bob's computers that needed repairs. While there, I picked up a USB memory stick. I've wanted one for years and just never got around to getting one. We then went towards St. Georges to a place called the Lexus Inn for lunch. We had been told by another couple that the food here was pretty good. It is right on the edge of the cliff overlooking the water, about fifty feet below. We sat at a table right at the edge of the patio, watching the waves crashing on the rocks below. This was quite unusual, since we are on the west side of the island just south of the St. Georges harbor entrance. This is normally the calm side of the island and boats anchor just off where we were sitting. Today though, the wind has been blowing from the northwest (very unusual) and there is a good sized swell coming from the northwest (also very unusual). There are only two boats, both large catamarans, anchored here today, and they are rolling like crazy. I wouldn't want to be out there in these conditions, but it makes for a cool show on the rocky shore. Lunch was pretty good. It was typical local food. Barb had honey mustard chicken and I had marlin with a sweet and sour sauce. The marlin was a little tough, but tasted good. We were told by the other couple who recommended the place that the owner was from Arizona. We saw him walking around, but didn't get a chance to talk to him. After lunch we went to the store and did our shopping. Since the students are back at the medical school, it was pretty crowded.
A couple weeks ago we had taken our cockpit cushions over to Turbulence Sails & Canvas to have new ones made. They called a couple of days ago to say the news ones were ready. We picked them up and found the price to be a little less than the estimate, and the work perfect. We got them back to the boat, and the only problem is that they look so good that you hate to step on them as you get in and out of the cockpit.
We have always had a problem with the reception on the satellite TV here at certain times of day, and during periods of heavy wind. It also would loose the signal during a heavy rain storm, but that's a common problem with satellite TV. Bob had the guy who installed the system come over to check out the antennae, thinking maybe it had a bad connection or something which would explain the poor signal during windy conditions. The guy got into a setup screen from the Direct TV box that displays signal strength, and it was only 35%. He adjusted the dish a little and got it up to 90%. The poor original position of the antennae was good enough when it was installed, but there is a palm tree in the path of the signal that is bigger now, and was causing interference. So no, we have a no more signal problems, even during a heavy rain.
GPS N 12-00.639 W 061-44.360 Nautical miles traveled today 0. Total miles 9539.
Feb 2
This weekend is a sports weekend here, with our new big screen TV. We had been asked by some cruisers if we could show the Six Nations Rugby tournament, which is available via the Internet. We agreed to do that, and the first two games are today. We figured we would have maybe a dozen people here. Well we were wrong. We had about a dozen for the first game, but forty for the second game. We came close to running out of several things as we weren't expecting that crowd. As soon as the second game was over, almost everybody left. I took that opportunity to go to the store to replenish the stocks.
John Pierre, the guy who cut his feet badly with the electric grinder, has been working today with a circular saw and a jigsaw. When he came in for a drink before dinner, we made a point of counting all of his fingers. We were pleased to see everything was intact.
We had a very small turnout for potluck tonight. There were just six of us, but we had a nice dinner. Given the small attendance, we didn't do karaoke.
GPS N 12-00.639 W 061-44.360 Nautical miles traveled today 0. Total miles 9539.
Feb 3
Another sports day at CCBM. There was another rugby game on at 11:00, which had about a dozen people watching. After the game was over it was very quiet until about 18:00 when people started showing up for the Superbowl. The ABC station we get here is from Puerto Rico, so we were hoping we would get the whole US feed of the game, including commercials. Unfortunately, we only got some of the national commercials, but we saw a few good ones. The rest of the commercials were in Spanish and aimed at the Puerto Rico market, but even some of them were funny and obviously new for the Superbowl. The game itself was a great game. Many Superbowls in the past have been boring games, and you watch just for the commercials, but this time we got a good game too. I would have been happy with the outcome regardless of who won. There were great stories on both sides of the field.
Overall it was a great weekend. We were tired when it was all over, but the bar did great.
GPS N 12-00.639 W 061-44.360 Nautical miles traveled today 0. Total miles 9539.
Feb 4
We had a little dock excitement today. I should say Barb did, because I wasn't aware of it until it was all resolved. A boat on the south dock broke a dock line and was now up against the boat next to it. Barb rustled up a couple of guys from other boats, and two of our grounds guys and they got the boat back where it belonged and secured with another line. Fortunately, both boats had fenders out and there was no damage.
It was a quiet day compared to the weekend. I went shopping to replenish what we used over the weekend, and prepare for burger night. For the second week in a row, we could not get any ground beef for burgers, so I had to get more Bubba Burgers. After four stores, I had everything on the list and headed back to the marina.
We got two new boats in the marina today, both of them from Texas. Island Dreamin, with Bob & Jeannie onboard left Kemah a couple of months before us. They had been at Marina del Sol in Kemah, and we have several friends in common, although we didn't know each other there. Bliss, with Casey & Melanie aboard is from Port Aransas which is down near Corpus Christi.
We had an early night tonight, which was welcome after the late night before.
GPS N 12-00.639 W 061-44.360 Nautical miles traveled today 0. Total miles 9539.
Feb 5
We had two batches of kayakers today. That was a first. One batch came in the morning and when the bus came back to pick them up around noon, it brought a second batch of people. I usually make fun of the kayakers, since most of them are middle-aged or older and are very, very white. I suppose most of the people taking a winter Caribbean cruise come from somewhere cold where they haven't seen the sun in a while. These people were different though. Most of them were under forty and some actually had signs of tan already.
We changed Ashley's hours this week. Part of the change was due to her school schedule changing. So now she will have Fridays off instead of Tuesdays. While we were making changes, we decided to change her hours on the two days that she is here during the day. Instead of 08:00 to 17:00, she will now be here between 10:00 to 19:00. This will have her here during happy hour time when lots of people come in for a couple of drinks before dinner. I enjoyed my evening visiting with the cruisers instead of tending bar.
GPS N 12-00.639 W 061-44.360 Nautical miles traveled today 0. Total miles 9539.
Feb 6
We had a very quiet day today. Barb spent the morning in the bar while I worked on my computer on the boat. I had two issues with the computer. Our e-mail had stopped working yesterday and seemed to have something to do with our mail server. The other problem was with Norton 360, the package that does anti-virus protection. It had an error message that said it wasn't turned on and no matter what I did, it would not come on. Yesterday, I opened a help desk ticket with our hosting company regarding the mail. They answered it this morning and said they had updated something about where our IP address was coming from. They said it would take from four to forty-eight hours for the fix to propagate. We'll see. Meanwhile I search Norton's website for any clues about my problem with their product. It has been installed and working fine since November, so I'm puzzled why it's acting strange now. I found one case that sounded like the same problem, and went through the steps they said would fix it. After rebooting the machine, it still acted the same. Frustrated, I broke down and started an online chat session with Norton. After waiting a few minutes, I was connected to a guy in India who didn't try to conceal where we was by using some made-up American sounding name. He offered to take remote control of my computer to fix the problem and I said sure. However, the remote control connection wouldn't work, so he had to step me through the fix. He had me editing registry entries, which is something the average user never does, but we got through it fine. Except it didn't fix the problem. The next option was of course uninstall and reinstall the product. I hate that answer, but it seemed there was no other option. It took about an hour, but I got it done, and to my surprise it did fix the problem. Damn computers!
The only thing I needed to get for burger night tonight was the buns, which come direct from the bakery in Tempe. As I drove over there, I passed a number of schools. Tomorrow is Independence day in Grenada and all the school kids were decked out in yellow, red, and green, the colors of the Grenadian flag. Everybody has flags tied to there car antennas, and there are flags and banners all over the country.
In the afternoon, we got a new boat in that we weren't expecting. They are folks who crossed the Atlantic in December with the ARC (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers). They will be with us for a couple of days.
Burger night was quite light. We only had twenty people. I've been expecting burger night to slow down for a couple of weeks now, but it hadn't happened. You never know.
GPS N 12-00.639 W 061-44.360 Nautical miles traveled today 0. Total miles 9539.
Feb 7
Today is Grenada's Independence Day. This was the day in 1974 when Grenada became an independent country and not part of Britain. Everything is closed today, except us of course. There is a large parade and ceremony in St. Georges at the Queen's Park. The ceremony was being covered on local TV, and we thought it would be cool to watch. Unfortunately, the new flat screen is a monitor, not a TV, so it has no tuner. We have an antennae in the bar that worked with the old TV, and I have a USB TV tuner that came with my laptop that I have never used. I figured how hard could it be to hook up, so I went to the boat to find it. It took us a little while to find, because we were looking for it's original box, forgetting that the box had been trashed and the tuner put in a Ziploc some time ago. When we found it, I took it up to the bar to hook up. It looks simple enough - USB cable between the tuner and the computer, place to attach the antenna coax to the tuner, and a CD with the driver. I plugged it in, it did the normal plug-and-play new hardware routine, and all seemed fine. Now I just have to figure out how to use it. I found a program called Media Center. This is not the regular Windows Media Player, but something that only is part of machines that run Windows XP Media Edition. When I bought this laptop, I didn't care about all the slick extra stuff it had to do multi-media applications. I just liked the 17" screen. I opened Media Center, and found "Setup TV Signal" in the menu. When I tried to do this though, it said there was no tuner or it was malfunctioning. I went into the Device Manager and it showed the tuner as present and operating normally. I spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out why it wasn't working, discounting the option that the box was physically not working, since it has never been used. By the time I finally gave up the ceremony we wanted to watch was over anyway. Barb watched most of it on our TV on the boat and said it was cool.
The day was very quiet. It was not only quiet in terms of business, but it was physically quiet since there was almost no traffic and no trucks or buses on the highway across the bay. It's amazing how much noise the constant horn tooting makes. During the afternoon, we all watched a DVD. In the evening we had a few cruisers in for happy hour drinks and closed about 19:00.
GPS N 12-00.639 W 061-44.360 Nautical miles traveled today 0. Total miles 9539.
Feb 8
Today is shopping bus day. A little change for us is that now Ashley is off on Friday's because her school schedule changed. We used to go to the grocery on Friday also since Ashley was here all day, but we'll have to start shopping on Saturday instead. We later learned that this week, it was to our advantage because the weekly container had not been unloaded Thursday night due to the holiday. So apparently the shelves were quite bare.
Again we had a fairly slow day. People dribbled in and out all day, but by 18:30, we were alone. We had been invited to dinner aboard Bliss, another Texas boat, so we went ahead and closed early. We joined Casey & Melanie, and Bob & Jeannie from Island Dreamin, another Texas boat for chicken enchiladas, black beans and rice. Bliss is a 56' Oyster, and is just a beautiful boat. It's big enough that you pretty much forget you are in a boat when you are below. We enjoyed sharing stories of back home for several hours, and got back to our boat about 22:30.
GPS N 12-00.639 W 061-44.360 Nautical miles traveled today 0. Total miles 9539.
Feb 9
Today was a busy day. We had three boats come in to the marina today, one expected and two not. The one we expected was Diesel Duck. Diesel Duck is a custom built motor sailor. The aluminum hull was built by a boatyard in Toronto, and then the hull was taken to Bob's indoor boat storage facility near Toronto, where the owner spent six years finishing out the interior. Diesel Duck was here in the marina last June when we got here, but Benno & Marlene were not aboard. We flew out of here a couple days after arriving, and they came back and left before we got back. So, while we have heard the story of the building of the boat from Bob, and we have followed their travels for the past six months on the Coconut Telegraph SSB net, we had never in person. After they docked, they invited us aboard to see the boat. It is a very unique boat, and the interior is beautiful. The other two boats that came in were Nijo, a boat that had been here for a couple days a few weeks ago, and Suhaila. Suhaila turned out to be from Kemah, TX also. The owners are Scottish, and the boat is registered in Guernsey, but Gordon & Sue spent much of their life working in the oil industry, some in Houston. They bought the boat in Kemah and left a few years before we did.
We had Rugby games on again today. The attendance wasn't as big as last weekend, but we still had almost twenty people here for both games. The games were over by about 14:00 and we had a couple of quiet hours before the pot luck. Pot luck attendance was fair. There were about ten people and plenty of food. Nobody was interested in singing, so we didn't do karaoke, but a number of people stayed pretty late drinking and visiting. Four locals came in about 22:00 and started playing pool. They were showing no signs of leaving by midnight, so Bob offered to stay until they left and let us go to bed. I closed out the register, since we knew they were not paying cash, and did all the closing things so that all Bob had to do was process their payment and turn off the lights when they left.
About 03:00, I got up to use the bathroom. I noticed that the bar was entirely dark, including the outside lights, which stay on all night. My first thought was that Bob hadn't closed in so long that he forgot what to turn off and what to leave on, although I really knew that wouldn't happen. I got back in bed, and then noticed that the night lights on the dock weren't on either. Something was wrong. I pulled my shorts on and was just climbing out of the boat as Christopher, the security guard, and Bob were about to knock on the boat to get me up. Turned out the power to the whole island was off. Bob had been on his way home when it went off, and he came back to start the generator. The generator was powering our street lights and the bathroom building, which was why I didn't realize what was going on right from the start. The reason Bob needed to get me up was because the generator was not full of fuel. The fuel cans are kept in the storage trailer that I have the only key to. So, we got a can of fuel and filled the generator, so it can run until dawn. There is a problem though. The generator should be capable of running all of the building lights, including the bar. But, when Bob turns the main breaker for the bar on, the generator overloads and kicks offline. Something has apparently changed since we had the main power upgraded last fall. The generator has not been used since then. We agreed that we needed an electrician to figure it out, so we ought to just go to bed. Bob showed me how to shut the generator down in the morning and return power to the docks at dawn, assuming the power is back on. Just when he finished showing me, the power came back on. So, we went through the steps of shutting down the generator, and flipping breakers back on to the docks. I was back in bed about 04:00, although I was wide awake.
While I was up, I asked Christopher, the security guard, if he had seen Lou, the marina cat in the past couple days. He has not. I think I've told the story of the marina cat before, but I'll repeat it. This cat is black and white, and tiny. When she first started hanging around, we thought she was not full grown, but she hasn't gotten any bigger. She was basically wild, but attached herself to Christopher. When he would come to work, she would get under his feet and rub against him and follow him all over on his rounds. When he would leave in the morning, she would follow him to the property line and then go somewhere for the day. We never saw her during the day. If John, the other security guard was on duty, Lou would not go near him, and she would cry in a pitiful little voice. Christopher named her Lou, because he didn't know if she was a boy or a girl, and Lou would work either way. Over the past few months, several of us have fed Lou and she has gotten to where Barb and I can pet her. I even picked her up once, which she was ok with for about five seconds. Anyway, over the past few weeks, it became certain that Lou was a girl. She was getting noticeably fat, and it wasn't all because she was getting fed pretty well. We notice yesterday that we hadn't seen her. I asked Christopher and he said last night she showed up in the middle of the night, ate some and then disappeared again. Tonight, he didn't see her at all. So, we wonder if she has had kittens and if she and they are ok, but we have no idea where she hides.
GPS N 12-00.639 W 061-44.360 Nautical miles traveled today 0. Total miles 9539.
Feb 10
I was up at 07:00 as usual today, despite the late night. Two boats, Sealeaf and Imagine left this morning, heading north even though the forecast is for bigger seas than I would want to be out in. Both boats are over fifty feet, so they handle rough weather better than we would, but it still seemed rough to leave to me.
We have more rugby on TV today. We had a smaller crowd than last week for the England game, but still had about twenty. In the late afternoon/evening we had the Pro Bowl (American Football) on. We had about a dozen folks show up, but nobody was really watching the game. They were all just socializing, and most left early in the third quarter. So, we shut the place down before then end of the game.
Lou the cat showed up again, long enough to get something to eat and then disappear. I'm guessing she has kittens somewhere.
GPS N 12-00.639 W 061-44.360 Nautical miles traveled today 0. Total miles 9539.