Arrival in Curacao

                                                                                                            29/10.2012

A taste of Holland in Willemstad

The entrance to Spanish Waters wasn’t exactly where it was supposed to be….Our Navionics charts indicated our track as having gone roughly through the foyer of the Hilton Hotel on the right of the charted entrance. (The warning on the Raymarine does say that it should NOT be used for navigation, so they are in the clear!!) In their defence, I must add that the small print on both the Garmin and Open CPN make reference to the fact that there are known errors of x amount on the electronic charts of the western Caribbean.

We motored slowly down the channels and anchored on the edge of section B. That we were too close to the edge of the buoyed anchorage, was brought home by two V8 powered racing boats roaring past on either side of us at about 60 knots. There are no speed limits in Spanish Waters! We quickly moved to the back edge, safely out of the way of the speed merchants, and started making plans for our check-in procedures for the next day

This involved catching a bus to Punda, a section of the very attractive capital of Willemstad. We walked passed the “floating market”, where Venezualan merchants bring in mountains of fruit and fresh produce by boat. The brightly coloured buildings, pavement café’s and restaurants, up market shops give the city a very First World and European feel. 

Willemstad

The restored Queen Emma floating bridge, built in 1888, adds to the charm of the city, along with some typical Dutch lifting bridges, and one high and impressive road bridge which goes over the harbour below it.

The elegant road bridge over the harbour and Immigration!

The customs were friendly and easy. We then had to walk about two miles over the floating bridge, to the scruffy harbour below the road bridge, to find Immigration and Port Authority. Here the single official actually working hated the job, worked at a snails pace, in a less than suitable office. This step took about an hour, as the official first had to explain to the applicant in front of us, that he could not get a visa extension, and would have to leave. The applicant would not accept having to leave in the face of Hurricane Sandy, and the fact that Hurricane season only ends on 1^st December. In the end he walked out saying he understood that he had to leave, as soon as possible, and that as far as he was concerned, that would be 1/12/2012! He is still here a week later. We had also seen him in Bonaire, where he had gone specifically to restart his Curacao 90 day visa. The woman he was dealing with, had a big thing about that meaning 90 days in any one year. The other Immigration people don’t seem to mind in the least.

Stave and Chris from "Scott Free" checked in with us

A local here, from whom one buys wifi, told us that she is known as a bit of a problem, a woman on a crusade. They tried transferring her to the airport, to stop messing the yachties around, but she caused so much chaos at the airports, delaying flights etc, that they sent her back to the harbour. Why don’t they just fire her, I asked   “No you can’t fire anyone in Holland!” he replied.

The Queen Emma floating bridge fully opened

Getting legal here entailed filling in the same information as we had done in  customs, despite having given the photocopies of the same, and  then having new photocopies made for us to present to the Port Authority. And yes, once again, in a totally inadequate cubicle of an office we had to fill in the same information , hand over our photocopies from Customs and Immigration,  pay $10 anchoring fee, and wait for copies of their rules . Another grumpy official who hated her job made this a less than joyful experience.

 3D beautifully painted artwork brightens a simple alley! 

The difference between the simplicity, efficiency and friendliness in Bonaire, and the tedious bureaucracy in Curacao is quite amazing!

Floating Bridge opens half way for smaller vessels

                                                   

Sitting down for a well earned beer, watching the Floating bridge open and close for ships, Steve and I compared our Port authority rules. They were completely different pages!  Apparently Aruba is getting even more complicated, requiring the temporary import of foreign yachts, and mandatory usage of customs agents. Noonsite (a cruising information website) reports that RSA Customs are embarking on the same scam, trying to tax and fine non complying vessels in Durban, despite SARS denying it all!

The mustard colour of this church seems a Dutch favourite!

                                                

 I somehow managed to break my 3^rd tooth since we left home.  I used Skype to phone Dr Chong’s Dental clinic to make an appointment. The little Chinese receptionist who answered asked for my name and number. “Rod, and I am using Skype because I don’t have a Curacao phone, and am on a yacht”

“Aah-so,.. Lod ,u on a boat? Where u flom?”

“South Africa, Cape Town”

“Gee…. U say AWE that way…?  I mus see u…. Aah u black or why ? Ooh…shudn arse that…. Ok I make appoinmin for eleven ok Lod?

I duly arrived at 10.00, hoping to be fitted in early. The different receptionist on duty could not find the appointment for “Rod at eleven”. I suggested she looked for a “Lod” at 11.00.  “Yes, now I see, Lod!

Well, after an x-ray and a thorough check up, “Lod” had to make a 2 ½ hour appointment for the following week for a tooth reconstruction….. so its baby foods for the next week. At least we are in a safe and pleasant anchorage! 

Dawn over Spanish Waters

                                                         

The ups and downs of technology!!

our MFD

                                                                                                         29.10.2012

Our Raymarine C90W chartplotter is classified as a MFD (Multi Function Device), as it can variously, or simultaneously display charts, Radar, AIS info, forward looking depth, and navigational progress, and error, along a planned route. Yes, it is a very clever piece of kit. But…….when it fails and freezes, taking with it the autopilot, in the dead of night, at critical points……5 times… one can almost be forgiven for describing the MFD in somewhat different terms!

On the trip from Grenada to Bonaire, our MFD did just this, so one of my challenges in Bonaire was to find out why, and what to do about it. As always, the first step is….check the manual. No help there as the manual that came with the kit was of the 20 page “how to get started” type…. The detailed 230p manual has to be downloaded and printed from the net. This is now a typical cop out by suppliers to avoid the hassle of supplying manuals with their products.

I decided to ask the Raymarine Technical support team for their help. They required me to first supply them with the reference numbers of all my Raymarine products, to confirm that I had registered with them at the time of purchase. I was also looking on the net for any other users who had experienced similar problems. Sadly there were many, and even more sadly, not too many encouraging comments about the support I could expect from the technical support team.

I did get 2 replies to my queries. One from Raymarine which almost implied that the units failure was my fault because I had failed to update the software to the latest version 2.35 now available as a net download. The second bit of advice came from an independent marine electronics fellow, who also told me to upgrade to the new 2.35 v, as the previous Raymarine software for the C90W had some “gremlins”!

Now to do this upgrade requires first the download, then a transfer to a CF card, via a CF card reader. Fortunately my mate Steve on Scott Free had these on hand, the result of a similar problem he had back in Florida. He also knew the procedure, which involves firstly saving all ones own waypoints and routes to the card, deleting the old version, installing the new one, and then going through the set up procedure to get the unit up and running as before. With Steves help, we did this quite quickly, but without his CF card and reader, I would have had to employ the local Raymarine guy to do the job, and pay him for the privilege of fixing one of their  software gremlins!

I sent them an email asking why , if they expected clients to regularly update the software( to improve service, or remove gremlins) they do not include with the equipment a, the instructions, b, the spare CF card, and c, the card reader, when one lashes out substantial wads of wonga to buy a totally integrated package? Needless to say I have not received a reply!

Our stand by NASA AIS

The trip to Curacao did prove that we were up and running again, in all respects except the AIS link. It was just as well that we had the other Nasa AIS system as a back up, as we found ourselves dodging about 7 tankers along our short route.

The MFD's AIS is up and running again!

Another set up routine was required to fix the AIS link, but in the process we managed to lose all our waypoints and routes up to Curacao, but hey, so what!! We’re not going backwards… only westwards!

Bonaire - a very special little island

27 Oct 2012

Travelling buddies, Scott-Free, moored in Bonaire

Checking into Bonaire was a breeze........simple, efficient and friendly....."ons is altyd hier vir jou". The dialect of Dutch spoken here is very similar to our Afrikaans, unlike Dutch spoken in Holland and we found it easy to understand. 

Despite the frequent  thunderstorms, the terrain is dry and arid

It is a surprisingly rocky, dry and arid island with landscapes and vegetation more reminiscent of Namibia than of the Caribbean. There are very few sandy beaches, and this is one of the main reasons for the spectacularly crystal clear water, that make Bonaire a diving and snorkeling paradise.

Swimming off the back of the boat is like being in an aquarium, surrounded by pretty reef fish. Apart from these, we often saw 4 ft Tarpon cruising by, curious Baracudas hanging motionless, waiting for some prey to take their fancy, and the odd green turtle, looking in vain for a bit of sea grass. Pipe corals and brain coral are everywhere, and grow on the 3 ton mooring blocks for yachts, and even the old engine blocks that some of the locals use to moor their little fishing boats!

Stoplight parrotfish 

Juvenile Angelfish

Curious barracuda

Sergeant Major

French angelfish at the Stoplight

There is no anchoring in Bonaire, to protect the coral….. the only case we've seen in the Caribbean where this is genuine! There is a narrow shelf about 100 mts wide between the shore and the deep drop off, where one has to pick up a mooring buoy. They are well maintained and cost $10 per night.

Kaya Grandi......Main Road

 The main down town area is attractive, with an array of upmarket shops, aimed mainly at the cruise ship market. Karels Bar on the waterfront is the hang out where most yachtie cruisers meet.

Chilling in Karel's Bar

We hired a car with our friends, Steve and Chris (Scott-Free), and did an island tour to explore from the Washington Slagbaai Park in the north, to the salt pans in the south. The roads were muddy and slippery, but our driver, Steve did brilliantly and only got stuck once!

Stuck in the mud with Steve

Very pink flamingoes

The Park does not offer much by way of wildlife, apart from big Green Iguanas, flamingoes and Orange shouldered Parrots. The topography varies from back of the moon gravel and rocks, to cactus fields. The rocky coastline offers many crystal clear dive sites.

Green Iguana

A fossil amongst the jagged rocks

Unlucky Baleen

All the park buildings were neat and clean and the skeleton of a baleen whale (which arrived impaled on the bow of a cruise ship) ends up as an exhibit in the picnic area.

The super clean ablution blocks made interesting use of cactus paintings to depict the “His “ and “Hers”!

HERS and HIS!

We returned to the anchorage after going around the salt pans, which are Bonaire’s other source of income along with tourism. Four coloured Obelisks (Red, Orange, Blue, White) were used to indicate the four different qualities of salt available to the merchant ships of old, who used to stock up here, The Orange area also has a reconstruction of the slave houses…. all 10 x 6ft of them with minute crawl-through doorways.

Restored slave quarters at the salt pans

Orange Obelisk

Anyone for salt?

With a big tropical Low building up in the Colombian basin, which weather guru, Chris Parker, was predicting could turn “Nasty”, we decided to sail the 36 miles to Curacao and anchor in the safe haven of Spanish Waters. We had to wait for a huge thunderstorm to pass over before leaving, but then had a gentle sail over to drop anchor in Spanish Waters;

The big low did in fact turn into Hurricane Sandy, which is now threatening the US Presidential elections! Shame!!   

A day in the life of a cruiser!

 12/10/2012

Dumb design!

                          

Our topping lift exits the mast below the winch, which means that a stupid amount of pressure is exerted on the sheave, when raising the boom to hoist the mainsail. It really is a silly design, using an under-spec sheave designed for dinghy loads. It has failed twice before.

What's left of the sheave

It collapsed again on our sail down from Grenada, shortly before we noticed the hole in our mainsail, and the port secondary winch decided to seize up!

Fortunately, it jammed in a way which did not prevent us using the topping lift…. We just wore a groove in the plastic sheave!

So we had our projects lined up for us in Bonaire, starting the day after we had caught up on the lack of sleep from the trip!

1)     Fix the hole in the mainsail…….stitch the seam in the panels of the mainsail, where the reefing line had chafed away the 3 rows of zig zag stitches.

2)     Strip the seized winch, clean and re-grease it, and then service the other winches again to avoid another seizure!

3)     Remove the topping lift sheave box from the mast, and try to find a replacement ashore.

Jobs 1 and 2 went without a hitch, thanks to an amazing product called “Power Blaster”, which miraculously un-seizes almost anything! This stuff, plus  “Corrosion X”, are essential bits of kit for a cruiser!

Job 3 turned out to be a pig! No replacements in Bonaire. Nor were there any sheaves suitable for me to rebuild the old box with a new sheave. Clearly it was time for a bit of creativity. I went through all my spare blocks, looking for one with the right size sheave to pirate. All the right sized ones were too lightweight for the job, and would certainly fail again.

Block piracy

In the end I cut up a spare running backstay block, which had a solid sheave which was a little bigger. Once removed, I found that the centre hole was too big, and that the sheave was too fat to fit the box. More creativity required. I found a Tuffnell sleeve liner, which was even bigger than the centre hole in the sheave. So I drilled out the sheave centre hole, and pressed in the tuffnel sleeve. I then had to drill out the centre hole in the tuffnel sleeve, so that I could fit the stainless steel sleeve into it, which acts as the bearing.

The new sheave then had to be sanded down a few “mils” to fit inside the topping lift box.

I then had to make an axle for the sheave out of a bolt, by grinding the head down to 1mm, and cutting the nut on the other side to a similar size, so that the box could fit back into the hole in the mast. Nearly done! I then just had to trim the sides of the bolt head down a little more with the angle grinder…… Damn! Damn! Damn! I had to censor what I really said!!

After nearly 3 hours work, the completed box just jumped out of the vice and flew overboard!!!

Never mind, this is the clearest water we have ever seen, so how difficult can it be to find a shiny stainless steel box  in 5 to 6mts of water??

Our 3 ton mooring blocks.......5 metres deep

Two hours later, with 4 of us looking, we had to admit defeat as the sunset loomed! I sat down and sketched a working drawing to have a new one made up by a machine shop….. it would only cost $100 or so!!

Working drawing for replacement

We were invited by fellow cruisers to go ashore, and enjoy the Bonaire Festival, and sample their beer! After a couple of beers, I nearly managed to convince myself that $100 wasn’t so much, and that I would probably end up with a better box  anyway etc etc….

Live entertainment at the annual Bonaire Festival

By the next morning, I decided, “NO!!”, I had spent 3 hours making a damn good box, and it should not be allowed to pollute their beautiful  reefs anyway! I had put down my anchoring ball, weighted down with a weight belt, in a position close to where I expected it to have fallen. The boats swung around in 360 deg circles all day long, and by the time I started my search the next morning, my anchor ball was alongside my neighbours boat. The lady asked what I was looking for, and when I described the stainless steel box, she said “that should be easy to find!!”  She then looked past me and said she could see a shiny reflection to my left. I swam over, and “Bingo!”  The box had fallen and settled up against a pipe coral, and could only be seen from one angle…. the angle she had, from her boat, with the morning sun behind her.

I moved my marker ball to the spot, and contemplated whether I could persuade my aging body to do a 5 to 6mt free dive. I decided to give it one shot. Now armed with a weight belt, a few good deep breaths, and bit of adrenalin, I recovered the troublesome box without suffering burst eardrums or from a deep dive blackout syndrome!

Hope it lasts!

It is now safely back in place in the mast, and hopefully it will prove to be stronger than the original!

On our way home..........the long route!!

  3/10/2012

Not a volcano........just another sunset in St George, Grenada

After a couple of great years in the Eastern Caribbean, we are about to head westwards towards Panama and the Pacific!  Bonaire, Curacao and Aruba (A,B,C’s) represent the first step before heading for the ancient and historical city of Cartagena in Colombia. Thereafter, we will go on to spend a couple of months in the San Blas islands of Panama, before planning our canal transit in February 2013.  

Goodbye to friends......Renata & Steve from Hout Bay

Our time in Grenada has been geared towards preparing the boat for this next chapter in the “Journey of Sheer Tenacity”. As I’ve mentioned before, the “power struggle” is not a uniquely ANC party problem….its part of the daily struggle for all cruisers! After 3 or so years, the new batteries bought in Brazil were no longer holding their charge properly, and with a hungry “Freddie”, (Autopilot), the Pacific is no place to discover dead batteries!

Lithium ION is the future, but they are still in their infancy, and the BMC electronic management systems built in to each battery, make them complex and expensive at this point. Nor would we expect to find much by the way of support in the Pacific. Down the road, matched identical cells will replace the BMC systems, and bring down the prices. The advantages of Lithium Ion in terms of weight, usable power and sustained output will soon make them the first choice of all cruisers. But right now, we decided to go with the tried and tested lead Acid Deep cycle, so we bought 6 new Trojan 130AH batteries, which increase the “house” bank to 780AH. (We left RSA with 400ah!)  I kept the last two batteries bought in Brazil, and wired them into the Engine battery bank, bringing that bank up to 330AH too. The engine batteries are kept full via a separate solar panel, and the 2 added batteries are isolated from the cranking battery. The net result is that we should always have an extra 2 fully charged batteries in a crisis.

On a yacht “Absolute Power” is a joy! In politics, as Aldous Huxley warns, “Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely!”

Our first westward step was aborted minutes after checking out! We received an email from Bonaire telling us that all the mooring buoys and marinas were full as a result of next weeks regatta and festival. So we just checked back in again, and will leave in 10 days or so! See how chilled and mellow I’ve become?

The good life

Life as a cruiser is not always cold beers, sunshine and swimming! Yesterday Mary and I were caught in a massive electrical storm in the dinghy, as we were making our way out to Sheer Tenacity in the anchorage off St Georges. Very wet, noisy and frightening actually! We got back to the rolling and pitching boat, thoroughly drenched, with a dinghy full of water! An hour later the sun came out, and all was good!

The beautiful Carenage,  St George

The Castle overlooking the anchorage

It was not such a good day for one little fish, however. Earlier in the day, before the thunderstorm, which would have filled the tanks in 20 minutes, I had decided to use the watermaker to make water. While checking the filters and pressure, I noticed a little fish had been sucked into the first mesh filter, and was swimming for his life! An hour later he was still swimming for the Olympics! When I had finished making water, I decided that he deserved to be rescued. As soon as I had turned off the pumps and closed the salt water inlet. I unscrewed the filter. I had forgotten that the water level in the fresh water flushing tank was above the level of the filter, so the poor little fish suddenly had a fresh water shower, and was washed into the bilges.

Once I had decided on a rescue mission, I had to see it through… quite apart from the stink in the boat if I left him there! So it was away with the companionway steps and cover so that I could access the bilges under the water maker. I eventually found him and rescued him with a pair of braai tongs. He was still alive and flopping, so I put the steps back and went up into the cockpit to return him to the sea. With a warm and fuzzy feeling, I watched him suddenly appreciate his new found freedom, as he slowly swam away,……………only to be nailed by a marauding Garfish who ate him for dinner!