Sorry I have not written much on the blog. Yes we are still in a marina and still doing boat jobs. Boat repairs and maintenance at not everyone’s idea of a sailing adventure. Unfortunately it is a fact of life for all cruisers, and if your on a budget, you do it yourself.
Or in my case, you supervise the humans doing it! It’s a dogs life after all!
Well, you are not going to believe it but, we are all taking a little break from boat work and going on a well earned holiday. Aunty Helen and Uncle Steve are flying all the way from England to visit us.
I am going to keep some of the local cruisers in the Marina company while the humans go off and pick them up. Before they bring them back they are going to do a little sight seeing in the city of Antigua
and Lake Atitlan
With lots of exploring in between. They are back to the Rio Dulce river for a few days
Then they are off north to visit the famous Mayan ruins of Tikal.
All sounds like lots of fun. My humans deserve it after all the hard work they have been doing the past few months. I will not bore you with the entire list of jobs, many of which are only on hold, but I can at least show you how well the varnishing came out.
It was hard work, but didn’t the floors come out nice?
These stairs down to the galley and main saloon had been ‘sand blasted’ back to raw wood.
I got the humans to replace the counter tops last year, but it had been 10 years since the interior had seen a lick of varnish.
And, even back then, they had sorely neglected the navigation area. You would never know now how bad the boat leaked on the way to Cuba.
Even the saloon table finally got repaired and a coating of varnish.
Sea berth.
Well I can not say I am not glad to ‘see the back’ of that job. I had been reduced to living in the cockpit and the master cabin floor with all my scraps coming off the BBQ. And there is only so much you can make on a BBQ!
Perhaps the humans had that celebratory beer a little too early. A lunar eclipse fore told of some bad luck coming their way.
First is was the house bank of batteries. They stopped holding any charge at night. Yips, that is going to be expensive.
Then the foot (turning) block broke while the humans were disassembling it to service. A little bit of corrosion do you think?
The humans are going to have to get a local machinist to make and weld on a new section. On the bright side, it could have failed while underway.
To top it all off the manual bilge pump has given up the ghost with the deck wash pump and the main water system pump.
Oh well, we will deal with this all later, as we are off on holiday tomorrow!
