We've been here for two and a half months, now and our lives are surprisingly settled (or maybe not so surprisingly). In some ways life on a boat isn't much different from life on land on a day-to-day basis. Instead of mowing the lawn, I grease winches; rather than change the oil in the car, I change it in our diesel engines. Yes, it's true that we didn't have to think about our energy or water consumption back at the house (though we should have) and didn't have to worry about fetching our prop out of the canal (a stroke of luck, that one) or Percy out of the canal (do they EVER learn?), but we also don't have to think about shoveling snow, or snow even as an abstract concept and whenever it happens that we're not so keen on our neighbors, we can relocate in less than 15 minutes. A more than fair trade off, I'd say. Thanks to iTunes, we can even keep up with our favorite TV shows, not to mention find new ones--when we have an Internet connection, that is. Someday, some $15000 from now (plus monthly charges), we'll be able to be online whenever we want. For now, it's catch as catch can. For instance, just now, I'm sitting at the local watering hole, which isn't open, or rather, isn't serving (it's an open air bar, so it's always "open"), but has wi-fi, and thanks to our having stayed at the marina when we first came to Treasure Cay, we know the password... until they change it.
We did finally make it Green Turtle Club to toast "the idea" with Tipsy Turtles as a provocative hour. We'd actually accidentally gone to a Valentine's Day dinner at different marina on the same island the night before. I wanted to walk around the harbor to get a little exercise, but Jane felt that it didn't count if we didn't dinghy over, so we did. She dinghyed back; I walked (those Tipsy Turtles are chock full o' calories). On the way back I ran into Phil and Sally and Karin and Klitzer--fun to run into folks you know.
Last weekend, T-Cay (as it is it known to many of the residents), held a marine flea-market and because I've stared uncomprehendingly at all of the 3,127 spare parts on JOY, I though it was time to look at some new unidentifiable objects. We were also hoping to get a larger anchor, as ours is a little undersized. No luck on the anchor, but we were pleasantly surprised at how many of the items' identities we did have a guess about. No need to buy anything, we decided as we're already overwhelmed by the prospect of deciding which unidentifiable items in our own inventory to keep, space being at more of a premium all the time. We have provisionally settled on three organizational categories. Not because three suffices better than any other number, but because we (and when I say "we" I mean I), can't keep more than three consistently separate. The categories are: 1) "Know What it is and Know We'll Need it at Some Point" 2) Don't Know What it is, but it's Heavy and Therefore Probably Expensive to Replace" and 3) "It's so Small, it Can't Possibly Be All that Useful and/or Expensive." Of course, it would seem to make sense to keep the small parts just cause they don't take up that much room, whereas the bigger parts do, all else being equal (such as our equal ignorance of their functions). We may have to rethink our categories.
Our friends, Michel and Danielle on Gatito are back for a few weeks. It's good to see them again. We'll actually be leaving before Michel this time to return to the States for a major refit. And then, parts south. We're looking forward to moving on, much as we love it here.
No comments:
Post a Comment