Home Again

Well I've been back home now for 2 days. I can't begin to express how glad I am to be back on the boat with Griff. The flight(s) back was exhausting. I left Calgary, in a snowstorm, Tuesday at midnight MST and arrived in Curacao Wednesday at 8PM AST. That included 3 hours in the Toronto airport and 3 hours in the Miami airport. I was happy, excited, relieved and much more to see Griff in the Flamingo Airport Thursday morning at 9:30. (I had stayed overnight in Curacao because of availability of connecting flights.) It did rain a bit as we were dinghying back to the boat.

Then it started to pour as we were emptying the suitcases. Griff said that the process of opening the suitcases was like Christmas. In a way it was since my kids had sent our Christmas presents back with me and they were unwrapped, a Nintendo DS and the Stargate SG1 DVD series. Debbie had also sent our gift but it was wrapped so we will wait for Christmas for that one. I had bought a Golf game for the DS so now we can play golf against each other with 2 DS machines.

I decided that since it was pouring I would put up the rain collecting bottles. As usual, shortly after I put them up the rain stopped. This was Thursday morning and now it is Saturday morning and it still hasn't rained since it stopped Thursday afternoon. Of course it threatened all day Friday so we were reluctant to start painting the boat but we were able to finish the cockpit sanding.

Griff didn't take any pictures of sanding or priming the boat, but of course I took some when I got back. For some reason I was expecting the coach roof primer to be grey so I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was still white. Griff has a tarp over the windshield area to prevent the rain from going into the cockpit since the windshield needed to be removed for painting. In the cockpit the wheel is off, the table and cup holder are down and the instrument panel is completely taken apart. As I said, we spent some time yesterday finishing sanding the primer coat in preparation for painting.

In the afternoon we took some time and went snorkelling around the area of the boat for about 30 minutes. We saw some interesting fish. One flat fish that buried itself in the sand - if we hadn't seen it doing that we would not have been able to see it at all. Then there were two fish that were swimming together in an underwater ballet. A third fish tried to join in, but they would not allow that. We saw some fairly big parrot fish and some others that we don't know the names of. Of course there were the yellow and black striped fish and some angel fish as well as the pale white fish whose colour blends in with the sea bottom. We'll figure out how our new waterproof camera works and post some pictures.

Today we got the first coat of paint on the coach roof and so far it has only rained for about five minutes a couple of hours after we finished. Hopefully, that will have been long enough for the paint to have dried. The water beaded on it so we are keeping our fingers crossed. Now we are heading ashore to pick up a few supplies.