Thursday 4th July 2013
Well first of all, a big Happy Birthday to my nephew Dean, I hope you have a great day.
Also Happy Independence Day, to all our new American friends, am sure you will celebrate in style.
So today started off as a quiet one, we slept the sleep of the dead, last night, our first full night sleep in nine days, although not in our cabin, as its just way too hot.
Yesterday we managed to get a local SIM card for our phone which we hoped had Internet as well, and can use the phone as a wifi modem, so after buying that and going to the local bar, we decided to have a look at this thing put it in my phone, and connect up.
Not gonna happen as you all know with prepaid sims, you have to conform your minutes, easy? not when it's all in Spanish it's not.
So I kinda go begging to the bar man who is American, and he gets it all connected for us, to get the sim and Internet cost us under $10.00 dollars, but we have no idea, how long it will last and how much data we can use, I guess we will just have to wait and see.
The big problem is at the moment we threw all the paper work away at the bar, and now have no idea what our phone number is...hahaha
We eventually decide that we need to get ashore to check in, so off we go.
This time we decided to tie up to a different dingy dock.
As we got closer there was a young couple there, and they spoke English, YES.
So chatting away, we ask them where they are from, They say Maryland on the Chesapeake River, huh can you believe it, then he asked us if we knew Tom, talk about a small world, we actually met Trevor before we left America, but didn't recognize him at first. At one stage we were hoping to leave with them, this was back in November, crazy stuff and to meet up with them here of all places after, 8 months.
So off we go to Customs, and from what we could make out from the lady with a lot of sign language she was at lunch, and to come back at one, man we are starting to think why bother at all we just won't check in.
Now it's feels like 180° and what do we do go check out the local fort, yeah crazy, as its so hot I feel like I'm gonna die, we walk around a bit then come back, to some official building and sit on there steps in the shade, it felt so cool, there is something about building in stone, it felt like walking into air conditioning.
But we had to brave the heat once again and go see if this lady was finished eating so we could finally check in.
This was so hard, we could not understand a word she said, but we got our passports stamped and some official papers, so we think all was ok, then we were told to come back tomorrow at 11am, to see the port authority, well we think this was what she said....hahaha
Once back at the boat we needed to get some stuff done, as there is always a mountain of things to fix and clean.
The Captain fiddled and changed the new rigging, so hopefully no more chafing,
Me I was down in the galley in extreme heat trying to sort out all this fridge problems.
I started with the portable freezer, as it needed defrosting and was hoping this might fix the problem.
While it was defrosting, I went on the hunt again for the manual, and could not find it, so good old Google to the rescue, find one online, after The Captain and I with torches and mirrors trying to find the make and model number on the thing, which was a effort I can tell you, we have it all lashed down and to untie it all would of taken a lot longer well so The Captain said, me I thought it would of been easier.
Anyway so find the right manual, and even though it says its a Fridge/Freezer, it actually is only a fridge that keeps the frozen food frozen for a few days ...far out, no wonder things were defrosting, am not a happy camper.
Now we have two fridges, not very big ones and no Freezer. :-/
I don't even want to tell you how I feel about this.
So after I get everything back in the now 2nd fridge! It's time to do battle with the other fridge which also needs defrosting, this one had so much ice in it, you would swear it was a freezer, but no the more ice it has the less it cools, go figure.
It was about 11.30pm when it finally defrosted and everything packed back in there.
So we will see how it goes now.
Well tomorrow is another day.