1st April.
Its Gerry's turn to put a case of beer on for the lads, 65 today.
Don't bother with candles for the cake, its a fire risk, but 65 beers would suffice.
Join the grumpies & wrinklies Gerry.
Many Happy Returns, have a good one, in Cartegena ( top that eh!).
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Those that make up the 21,000 plus views of this topic feel free to add your best wishes to Gerry.
Who said you cannot bake bread and Hot X Buns without a bread maker, and even on a yatch.
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Well done Nicky. Needless to say there was no wasteage.
As well as baking, the large project has been renewing some of the canvas enclosure of the cockpit. One part was renewed completely, other parts have been repaired with limited success due to age and degradation of the canvas. There was quite a long and detailed explantion of the job, needless to say it wasn't plain sailing, but they were able to find out from the Stink Boat a reliable chap who could do the work on the his sewing machine and had the materials. A bridge too far for Nicky and her sewing machine.
The stink boat crew on the next berth offered to clean Opals hull of barnacles. Something Gerry could have done, but judging by tbe state of the marina water he put the job off in case he caught something worse than Covid. What with oil slick and blind eels around. It will be a tropical island before he ventures in.
The batteries under their bunk needed checking individually as the readout on the nav station wasn't looking healthy, fortunately all seemed to be well which left the question of why he was getting a different reading. Something to think about.
This was a days job with having to gain access to the batteries.
The ac filter ( I assume on the air side) got its weekly clean as first time it was done it was pretty grim, and to think your breathing that air.
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Never a month will go by without the after toilet needing some attention. Gerry decided that a larger valve was required in order to allow more water into the bowl. So armed with his computer a suitable valve was found on Amazon to be shipped to their agent and it fitted. Still a dose of Muriatic acid to clear and build up of scale in the discharge pipes.
The engine has been turned over a few times, the gen set has been run on a regular basis, the auto pilot hydraulic oil level has been topped up, the water tanks have been filled. A small amount of varnishing has been done on the cockpit table and drink holder mostly because the canvas cleaner took the top coating off of the varnish when I cleaned them on the cockpit table! Should be some more images shortly from a bit of exploring of Cartegena.
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Perhaps you could say, " Look at the Knockers on that"
Door I said. More of those later.
As we drove around I expressed an interest in the door knockers of the old city, knowing that they had historic roots in the type of trade that the owner of the building was engaged in, our driver obligingly pointed out many of them as we drove very slowly past so that I could take photos. The main ones that we saw fell into the four following groups -
The lion meant that the building belonged to the military or church,
The lizard meant that the owner was part of or descended from the royal family.
The fish or sea creature meant that the owner was a sea merchant or had a trade related to the sea.
The hand or hands meant the owner was of a religious family or clergy.
Whilst we saw a few other deviations from these groups I could find no explanations as to their roots, maybe they were creative deviations. They were certainly interesting and many were quite elaborate and beautiful. The other thing to note here is that the doors to the buildings tend to be huge with a smaller inset door, the reason for this apparently is that the huge doorway was/is used to allow horse and carriages/ moving trucks through whilst everyday movement of pedestrians and small traffic use the small doorway. These doors keep the inner courtyards cool and private by reducing the amount of sun beating down on them whilst allowing cool air to penetrate and preventing prying eyes observing the goings on inside the property. Many of the hotels that have opened up have open access to their courtyards and these are almost always set out as courtyard cafes or bars spectacularly full of green vegetation, water features and lots of bougainvillea in a riot of glorious colours and they are always cool to sit in. This will be the start of many images of Cartegena.
Just heard Nicky & Gerry will be setting sail bound for Colon for a week or two, a few jobs to be done there. Images will be slotted in when things are quiet but slightly out of sequence. Just looked through the street art images and your in for a treat.
There maybe a blog entry whilst on passage so I will keep up to date with that.
Gerry tells me the wind will have dropped a bit for the passage to Colon so they maybe trying to fly the 'drifter' which I assume is a 'big girls blouse ' type of sail to catch any wind thats going being of a very light material.
