Patience Part 2

This is the stuff they don’t talk about in the glossy sailing magazines. We have been pinned down by the weather for over 6 weeks now and life gets a bit routine. All the tasks that need to be done on land also need to be done on the boat.

Laundry. We are fortunate to have a small machine on board, so we do a load every two or three days. The dryer uses too much electricity (which needs to come from the batteries when we are at anchor) so it’s hung up to dry. Sounds good in principal but we have rain squalls that can blow through with little notice. It often means scrambling to get the almost dry clothes off the lines, only to put it all back out 10 minutes later. Good thing the clothes dry quickly.

Water. We have a water maker (desalinator). It works off our 12-volt batteries and takes a fair amount of power from those batteries. When we have sunshine, which provides us with solar power to keep the battery bank charged, we run the water maker and top up our tanks. It makes 12 to 15 gallons of freshwater an hour, so we’ll leave it running for 2 – 3 hours to keep our freshwater tanks filled.

Groceries. Interestingly enough, everyone on the planet eats. They may not eat what you do, but they eat. They are not likely going to have the same brand of supermarket you are used to. They may not even have a supermarket, but you will find food. Grocery shopping here usually involves stops at one of the “supermarkets” which are about the size of large convenience stores back home, a separate stop at a bakery and a separate stop at a produce store. We don’t have a large fridge or a lot of storage space on board, so grocery shopping is done a couple times a week. Keep in mind that we are at anchor so we must dinghy into the marina, walk to the store, carry purchases back to the dinghy and ride back out to the boat. You try and do the dinghy part between the rain squalls. Sometimes the timing is off.

Boat Maintenance. Very few if any boats are designed for liveaboard, constant use. The average boat gets around 100 hours of use every year. As cruisers we do this every week. Stuff breaks. Not all of it is fun to work on. Think toilets and associated plumbing. (Be thankful there’s no pictures). Often you are in areas without marine repair facilities. You need to fix it. We carry a lot of spare parts with us. It is impossible to know what will fail next and inevitably you’ll need a part you don’t have. Thankfully the cruiser community is very helpful and a lot of parts trading takes place. However sometimes you just have to order parts in. Getting parts can be complicated with shipping, customs clearances, duties and so on. We have friends in the harbour with us now, that had a warranty repair on a near new radar unit. The radar manufacture took responsibility for the replacement of the parts however the boat owner was responsible for the transport and found out that on top of paying for the shipping the customs duty on the “free” replacement part was going to be $1700. They are going without and will have the part shipped to a country with more favorable importation.

Trip Planning. When we look at moving from place to place, we have a number of information sources available to us. We use guidebooks to research specific areas and or ports. We have Starlink satellite internet on board so we can access websites like Ocean Posse and Noonsite for information. Blogs and Vlogs are read and viewed for personal accounts of places and of course we discuss with fellow cruisers that have been to the different spots. We also use the web to access weather information from sites like Windy, PredictWind and NOAA. This season we are also subscribing to Chris Parker for a paid weather service. We take all of this information then make our best guess at what we are going to do.

Six weeks is the longest we have spent in any one anchorage. While the list above makes the cruising life sound less perfect its still pretty good. In between all the chores we still manage to have a bit of fun. There is a tourist hot spot called Hainc Cay a short dinghy ride away. It’s a reef with 2 small islands connected by a floating plastic bridge and surrounded by sand and beach. The floating bridge is a real challenge. It moves up and down and side to side as the waves make contact. We decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon. It was packed with tour boats and people.

The shops here all close for siesta between 1- 3 PM ish. Somehow, we manage to time our shopping for late morning and lunch ends up being at one of the dozens of local restaurants or street side vendors. We have managed to find several good restaurants for dinner as well.

For some added excitement, a couple days ago there was an earthquake off the coast of Honduras that resulted in a tsunami warning being issued for our area. Expected arrival time was about an hour and twenty minutes after the announcement. Fortunately, about 30 minutes after the announcement it was determined that our area would not be affected, and we could rest easy. Glad that doesn’t happen every day.

3:30 in the afternoon is when the shade hits the tramp, we enjoy sitting up there with a cold beverage and watch all the boats coming and going. Tourist boats are coming back from the reef, parasailers, kiteboarders, wakeboarders, booze cruises, new arriving sailboats and even freighters all moving about. Its a busy harbour!

It looks like we have a weather window to leave in a few days. It will be about 4 -5 days to Grand Cayman. After 7 weeks in the same spot our anchor chain is going to need some serious cleaning before we can leave!