Remedial Dinghy Driving or My Evil Bauble

February 10 - February 16, 2007

Friday, February 16, 2007 - Hamburger Beach Anchorage, George Town, Exumas
By Tom

More and more boats continue to arrive. Last count was over 300.

I was right about the Christian Beach Nazis. They used Neville's memorial to preach to me. The sermon was actually pretty funny because preacher Jon said something about how you had to plant a seed to make it grow, but if you just put it in a glass jar to admire, it becomes a bauble and you are going to hell.

Of course as he is saying this I am wearing my hamburger bean necklace, which is actually a seed from a plant in Central America. I wonder if my own personal hell has 24 by 7 preaching going on all the time?

Let's see, what else is going on.... I went lobstering with Jon from Freebird on Wednesday and we managed to score 5 bugs and 3 fish. I kept the fish and 2 bugs while Jon took the 3 biggest bugs as he has to feed his 16 year old son Jack.

Speedo Ed sent an email from Florida saying he has gotten our new network adapters for our external wireless set-up and that he will be returning with them next week.

Speaking of wifi, I want to take a minute and talk about what we have set up. First off, we have an external USB wi-fi adapter. You could use the one built in to your laptop, but the USB one is a much higher wattage output, which translates into a much further reaching signal.

The USB device is then connected to a variable length custom cable. In our case it happens to be 30 feet. This cable is snaked from the inside of our boat at the salon table where we compute, under the floor board and through various ferret-only accessible areas. The cable leaves the inside of the boat via a power conduit and travels through one of our engine wells, up a cross-member and ends at the mount for our external antenna on top of the dinghy engine hoist.

The external antenna is a 15 db gain, omni direction, 3 foot mast attached to the dinghy crane via cable ties and electric tape. The key with the antenna is to get a high decibel number as this correlates directly to the range your signal will reach.

The reason I mention all of this is because we've had at least 30 people stop by and ask for what they need to connect wirelessly throughout the anchorage. I know there are several ways to do it, but this one works for us. I have included 3 hyperlinks below that go directly to the pieces and parts we have been using. The total system can be purchased for less than 150 bucks.

On the wind surfing front, I have been practicing as the wind allows. I have even progressed up to a 6.4 meter battened sail and found that it is easier to make the board go with the bigger sail. I've also pretty much decided to get rid of the advanced (sinker) board. It is too small for my size, too advanced for my skill level and it's taking up too much room on the foredeck. Remember, three strikes and you're out here on Team Dream Catcher.

We had a pretty strong cold front stall over top of the area and it resulted in westerly winds for three days straight. During that time in what seems to have been a comedy of errors, Amy managed to flip our dinghy over while trying to get back from her early morning yoga class.

Fortunately, the engine wasn't running and she wasn't hurt. It happened as she tried to leave another boat where she had dropped off one of her yoga students. I think what happened was that she put too much weight on a rear corner of the dink and submerged the rail. Water quickly poured over the edge and the resulting weight imbalance caused Amy and the dinghy to turn upside down.

For the record, Amy says it was a monsterous rogue wave in the harbour that broke over the dinghy from at least 40 feet up that caused the incident. Milo and I are sceptical.

There were several spectators and they quickly got Amy out of the water and got the dinghy righted. I borrowed Frank's (Cats Away) dinghy and went out to collect my wife.

It took the better part of a day to tear down and rebuild the engine. After another hour of trying, I got the engine to run again. It took two more days to get everything working back the way it was supposed to, but as of now everything seems to be ok.

As an aside, Amy's dinghy driving privileges have been suspended until she attends a driver improvement and safety course and then makes me 3 dozen chocolate chip cookies; the flat variety, not those puffy things that she likes.

Anyhow, we continue to put off the scrubbing of the boat bottom, but we are running out of time and excuses. We hope to leave Georgetown in the next two weeks, and that will only be possible if we scrape the ecosystem off the bottom of our boat. I suspect we'll tackle that in a few days and we may get out the underwater camera for a few before and after shots.

The ferrets are doing well, except for me almost baking Mila in the oven the other day. It's a good thing that the little ignitor doodad doesn't work and that we have to use a lighter stick to start the burners manually. Otherwise, her furry little ass would have been toast. Literally.

Oh yeah, we also had another laundry incident with Milo. We gathered our dirty clothes into a sail bag and went to St. Francis to do laundry and then found Milo hiding amongst the clothes. I thought we should have put him on the spin cycle, but Amy said no.

In poker news, I finished second on Monday night and on Thursday I was so far out of the money I don't think there was a number for where I finished. I'm not sure what happened there.

Other than that it was another quiet week here in G'Town. Talk to you soon....