march 2006 / april 2006 / and now almost may 2006 hi folks -- again i have let my monthly status reports go so long that this message is too big, sorry. trinidad -------- boat chores continue as i try to finish the things that didnt quite get done in the rerig, the windlass and mast reefing fittings. the windlass is almost done, would have been done except that one of the studs that electrical wires need to be attached to got its threads dinged somehow and i cannot get the nut on when i have it full of wires. goes on empty but not full. and of course with the windlass installed, you are lying upside down in the anchor well, in poor light. excuses, excuses. they told me when i arrived in trinidad and said i expected to be there only a month or two that trini has a way of snaring people and many with plans to leave in a month were still there after several years. i got there in sept 2005, but i will escape, soon. weather reports from afar ------------------------- my friend david (the anticarctic trip guy) sailed from panama to puerto montt in southern chile. thats the wrong way, against the wind and against the current. he first went to the galapagos, then to easter island and finally to the coast of chile. about a week out of panama his brand new ssb radio broke so he couldnt get weather info. in a panic he called my rigger friends pam and andy and had them ask me to get weather files, relay their contents to them and then they would relay the info to david in the middle of the pacific via satellite phone. it worked. every second day i would get a grib file from the weather dudes, look at it and tell him the center of the highs and lows and how big they were. 45 days later he made it to chile without major mishaps with weather. if a sat phone wasnt something like $12/minute, i might get one for wondy. dode/dick visit --------------- my college roommate, dodi, and her husband dick came to visit in february. dodi smoked all her young life and managed to end up with lungs that are a bit tired out; she gets out of breath walking a half a block on the flat. trinidad is mostly flat, at least around the boaty area, but climbing on and off the boat was a challenge. you dock med style, with the front of the boat pointing at a concrete wall, but not close enough to hurt the boat. there is about 3 feet of tide so at high tide the boat is close and at low tide its farther out. i never thought about the problem, but i have long legs. dick has very short legs and when you swing a short leg over the rail and are a guy instead of a girl and your foot doesnt hit the deck, it hurts. so between dode being out of breath and not so strong in the arms and dicks short legs one planned trips ashore carefully and tried to make a single on/off last all day. when we visited the grocery store it was clear that the intersection between the things i eat and the things dode and dick eat is empty. fresh fruits and veggies vs. junk food, spam, etc. but dodi makes a very yummy hamburger stroganoff which i requested and now is a staple on the boat. it even got added to my wonderland cookbook my nieces made me. we rented a car and explored the north shore of trinidad. went with a british couple and decided to let them drive since they were used to the wrong side of the road. mistake. jacquie must have been practicing for the monte carlo car rally, she went so fast and jerky on these narrow jungle roads. i took over driving and then at least i relaxed a bit. the north coast of trinidad is mountainous with a few small villages reachable by road and a few others reachable only by sea. we stayed overnight and had a whole house to ourselves. the scenery is beautiful. on the way back we stopped at the asa wright nature center, a bird sanctuary and museum that is a world heritage site. i was working on boat chores on wonderland so we went sailing on a friends boat, kijro, first in a race around the buoys and then for lunch and a swim to one of the islands near trinidad. we planned to go to venezuela across the bay of priai which would be a sheltered sail, rather than open ocean on wonderland too. but ... shane's heater fiasco --------------------- trinidad has a morning network, like a community radio program via the vhf radio. one morning a boat advertised a free sail cover. it was for a jib which i dont need, but was made of sunbrella, perfect awning material, so i was interested and called him up to get it. when i came aboard his boat, he said "oh, its you, evi". i looked at him and didnt have a clue as to who he was, where i had met him, etc. i must have looked very confused, he proceeded to make me guess. it was shane and i had actually met him in ft. lauderdale 20 years ago, but more recently just before i bought my boat. he is an expert on boats, although a bit of an arm-chair type sailor i think. anyway i got the sail cover and as i was leaving he asked if i didnt want a really nice heater. i said no, but my friend andy the rigger needed one. so for the next week or so, i took digital pictures and sent them to andy, andy looked up the heater on the web and figured out what a fair price for a used one was, etc. i should have suspected something was wierd when shane wouldnt say what he wanted for it and wanted andy to figure out a fair price. anyway he agreed with andys price and i set things up for my friends dick and dodi who were visiting to take the heater back to ft. lauderdale as checked baggage and for andy to pick them up at the miami airport. a total win/win/win situation, andy gets his heater, dick and dodi get a ride home from the airport and shane sells a heater he doesnt need in the tropics. shane came by a day later worried about my friends taking it as baggage in case it was damaged and andy wouldnt want to buy it. andy said he would guarantee it and i actually gave shane a check for it to totally guarantee it. should have known there was something fishy going on, but i didnt. then i tried to get the heater to pack it up before dick, dodi, and i sailed to venezuela. shane balked but finally gave me the main unit which i packed up. then i asked to have the rest of the parts for it by monday so i could pack them up and we could go sailing. i had had a few beers (it was superbowl sunday) and might have been a bit pushy or demanding. next morning, 7am, shane shows up and returns my check and says the deal is off. wouldnt discuss why he was mad or what was going on. wasted a week of nice sailing possibilities, learned shane can be a jerk/flake, never did figure out the real reason he killed the deal. maybe he couldnt find the other parts, maybe he had a better offer somewhere else, dunno - total fiasco. music in trinidad ----------------- carnival in trinidad is a bit different from brazil, but no less a craze. local people save all year for their costumes. in brazil costumes are not the main focus, the music is. in trini they are big on costumes and the music is mostly steel bands that play in places called a pan yard. they have competitions between the various bands leading up to carnival. i went to a few of the pan yards and to the mas camps where they design and make the costumes. making costumes employs lots of trinis for the few months before carnival. very elaborate. they also had impromptu music gatherings called tents, like a calypso tent. i went to one where the originators of calypso appeared. they were all old and incredible singers and on-the-spot-make-up-a-new-song'ers. calypso started in trinidad as social comment on local politics and politicians. todays version included some entertaining reflections on our president bush. good fun. i missed actual carnival to do another side trip, this time to southern chile. cruising in chile ----------------- back before xmas i had talked my way onto the boat, aqualung, that belonged to a british singlehander, who is singlehanding because he prefers to sail alone. i flew to santiago and then took a bus to puerto montt, about 10 hours drive south by fast car and about 14 hrs by local bus. but i arrived in chile at 6am and wanted to see part of the countryside. in trinidad where i booked my ticket continuing on to puerto montt by plane added $500 so i opted for the $24 bus ride. was quite interesting as we followed the mountains to the south. at one point we passed a ketchup factory, heinz i think, with about 30 huge trucks in line each chock full of red ripe tomatoes. they seemed to be driving under a huge slurping machine that vacuumed out the tomatoes as they went by. the last 3-4 hours of the bus ride were in the dark, and made me think that one way on the bus is enough and i should explore flying back to santiago when i left. i kept asking if we were in puerto montt and they kept saying no, not yet. finally at about midnight we were there and david was there to meet me. yeah. lovely cool weather, even cold by midnight. the weather in february/march was fall and went from downright cold to tshirt and shorts weather in the sun. the wind from the north was warm, but brought cloudy weather and rain, the wind from the south was cold but came with clear weather. i came with only one turtleneck shirt and one sweater and wore them every day. i have house rules on my boat, like tie the fenders this way and do a cleat knot that way, but nothing like the house rules of a british single hander. i was particularly anxious to sail with david because southern chile is not an area that i would take wonderland and he is a very good sailor and i thought i could learn a bunch about heavy weather sailing. only problem was that the waters are totally protected by the island called chiloe and therefore calm and the winds were reasonable. so it was like sailing in a big lake. davids boat is a bowman 48, that translates to a british 50 footer with a center cockpit, huge amounts of deck space, huge salon, shop area, engine room as large as my salon, etc. etc. but aqualung has had a series of electrical problems and david isnt an electrical guy, so he has thrown money at the problem, but fixing the symptoms not the cause. 29 batteries later, its still not fixed. we spent a couple of days fixing the latest ideas of what the root of the problem is and then went sailing for 3 weeks. the scenery is amazing, on the mainland side are deep fiords that head back toward the andes. the anchorages at the ends are a bit hairy with the bottom dropping off very quickly and often made of lots of medium sized rocks that seem to defy a plow anchor. also davids anchoring technique (let all the chain out while maybe he backs up or the wind backs us up) didnt work too well. but we eventually stuck. at some times of the year you need to anchor and then tie to trees ashore because the winds can come down the valleys into the fiords at 60+ knots. but that didnt happen and we had calm anchorages with forest, waterfalls, mountains. then after a couple of days in a fiord, usually as the only boat, we would sail across to some of the islands off the big island of chiloe. on the islands, there are susbsistence farms of animals, fruits and veggies, fish (usually salmon or seabass) or mussels. in many of the villages there are no vehicles and only a single pair of oxen (actually big boy holstein cows) pulling anything heavy on a cart with two solid wood wheels. just as it was 200 years ago. we found blackberries everywhere and picked them for dessert. there are also lots and lots of churches in this part of chile. most are wooden with interesting shingle patterns on the front and sometimes on the sides, but not often on the back. the religion is catholic because of the spanish influence, but includes lots of the original pagan beliefs of the original inhabitants, sort of melded into the catholic rituals. davids navigation was interesting. he didnt use the gps except once and it had us crossing a peninsula about a mile inland so i guess he was right. he used bearings on the ends of islands or on buoys. i learned a lot about that kind of navigation, including things like what a clearance bearing is. i still plotted our position using the gps, just to convince myself that we were where he said we were. he also reefed the mainsail way before i even thought about reefing and i am generally an early-reefer. he uses permanent preventers attached to the end of the main boom and rigged to winches in the cockpit. all his winches were power and they sure spoil you, just push a button and the jib comes in as fast and tight as you want. another big thing i learned was to coil the tail of lines like the main halyard so that if you want to let the main down, you just make sure the coil is right and open the clutch and let if fall. once i forgot to turn over the coil of jib sheet and everything fouled as we tried to tack. at one anchorage we met a local boat that had 3 british couples aboard, a charter boat but with a captain and cook provided. they invited us for drinks and so when we ended up in the same anchorage the next day, we invited them back for drinks and munchies. they said no, because they needed to visit the hot springs and then they were doing a bbq, but they had plenty so we should come to the bbq too. we said sure, not really knowing what that meant. but when we went ashore with our offering of wine and munchies, we discovered that the local family at the farm near the hot springs had butchered a lamb that morning and the bbq was that lamb roasting over an open pit fire. what a treat. i had the only flashlight and so shone it on the carving process when the meat was done. as a result i got to taste the little tidbits that drop as you carve a whole lamb. yummm. the best lamb i have ever had. we lucked out, totally. if anyone wants to charter in southern chile, i have the name and email of pablo who ran this boat, so just email me. we traded mussels with young kids (12-16) who dove for shellfish and also had a bit of a mussel farm. interesting. they took diesel over cash. the last week of my 3 weeks in chile with david, his sister jane visited and we sailed to chiloe and left the boat for side trips by day to various sites on the island. we rented a car, driving was on the right side of the road, but jane, who loves to drive, is practicing for the le manns race and scared me to death. passing trucks on blind corners because there usually was not much traffic. i finally said something and she got better. i was ready to get out and take a bus back to the boat. we did some hikes but both david and jane mean run instead of walk when they say hike. i like to stop and smell the flowers, take a picture, etc. so they ran on ahead and i eventually got there. chile has wonderful woolen goods, hats, mittens, sweaters, woven cloth, alpaca stuff. it was hard not to buy out the crafts markets we found. the little kids sweaters were especially nice. side trip home -------------- my flight back from chile stopped in miami for 3 days. my son laszlo came down to visit with his family and was planning to drive a rental truck back to colorado with all his dads goodies -- motorcycles (3), tools (3,000,000), cameras, pictures (50 years worth), etc. i decided to drive back with him. tried to change my ticket by a week and american airlines said sure, its only an extra $1069. i said what, how much is the one way fare from miami to trinidad and they said $500. something is wierd about airline pricing. i ended up spending frequent flyer miles to go from denver back to trinidad. it was sad going thru everything, but also fun for me to see all the pictures of my youth and to cabbage a couple of tools that i need for the boat. taught my 6 year old grand daughter, zokni, to ski. she is now self sufficient on the bunny hill and my knees understand the difficulties of snow plowing for a day. also managed a couple of trips to my favorite sushi restaurant, sushi tora in boulder. antigua sailing week -------------------- some racey sailing friends from boulder, john, lynda and anne, are coming to wonderland to enter him in the antigua race week sailing races. its supposed to be lots of fun. john and lynda came to trinidad to help sail wonderland up to antigua for the races. the first night they were there we went to see the turtles, huge leatherback turtles who come into the north and east coasts of trinidad in the late spring and early summer to nest. its a trip that starts at about 5pm, you drive 2+ hours to the beach where they come ashore, then you wait till a turtle shows up and a guide takes you to see her and the egg laying process. we lucked out and there was a turtle right at the end of the path (instead of a 5 mile hike away down the beach) and she was digging her nest. we went right to the beach and saw the whole process. the turtle comes ashore on a gently slooping beach because its a very hard for her to climb up the beach and if its too steep she wont get far enough up. the sex of the baby turtles is determined by the warmth of the sand, so eggs laid on steep beaches near the water are boys and eggs laid closer to the high tide line are girls. of course the mother turtles prefer girls!! we saw a turtle change beaches. the turtle digs a hole with her back flippers and drops the eggs into it. the eggs drop when she is in a trance and so you can take pictures and use flashlights to see whats going on. she lays about 70-80 eggs in one session and does several sessions, basically every 9 or 10 days. the eggs are the size of tennis balls and are squishy, not hard like a chickens egg. a few of the eggs are smaller like golf balls and havent been fertilized. they are used to provide air space in the pack of eggs so that the little turtles have some breathing room when they are trying to dig their way out and escape to the ocean. the female turtle has a way to store the sperm from her mates (she mates several times) and then uses the sperm to fertilize the batch of eggs that she lays at one time and then fertilizes the ones for the next time. the turtle that we saw was a leatherback and weighed about 600 pounds. she was medium sized. we could touch her when she was in the trance and dropping the eggs. after laying them she covered the eggs, then went a little ways away and messed up the sand to look like a nest to fool predators. these turtles live to be about 80 years old and are fertile from about 20 on till they die. they come back to the same beach that they were born on to lay their eggs. somehow they imprint the sand and its sizes to find their way back. it was totally awesome and trinidad has done a nice job of letting people see the process while protecting the turtles and the eggs. after turtling and provisioning we and my friend jean from the boat kijro, we sailed wonderland up to antigua via bequia and martinique. did it in 3 legs, with at least one or two overnights to catch up on sleep and see the islands a bit. we arrived at admiralty bay on bequia at night and i am never very comfortable with nighttime arrivals. we set a gps waypoint where an anchorage was noted on the chart and creeped slowly into the harbor. the bay is wide open with no reefs or other hazards so it should have been ok. but half the boats anchored didnt have lights and the gps was .2 miles off. if we had gone to the waypoint we would have been a few blocks behind the beach. anchored at the edge of the boats we could see and were quite surprised in the morning at how many we didnt see at all. we launched the dinghy with a new bridle that john made in trinidad. after he got the engine on and started he went for a spin. as i heard him start out i said to myself "boys and their toys". a minute later, lynda was stripping off her clothes and saying john needed help. he had flipped the dinghy and its engine. insists he wasnt hotrodding, but just going normally when the wind caught the front of the dinghy and as he was sitting in the far back on one side, just went over. other folks helped him right the dinghy and towed him back to the boat. for the rest of the day and the next morning he worked on getting the engine going again. i have a spare engine just like it that i got in trini from a boat for free, so he gave up after trying for hours with a headlamp and checked out how to dump the carbeurator on the spare engine. much easier than working on the bobbing dinghy in the dark. next morning it started right up. a day later i asked about the oil in it and couldnt see the oil in the little window to that you use to check it. when i opened the dip stick, milky watery oil spilled out everywhere. drained it all out by tipping the engine upside down, then filled it with fresh oil. changed it again the next day, so now it has real oil where it ought to. still doesnt run right though, the choke has to be out and it has no power. i have hated this engine since the valve cover rusted out in brazil, then they left out the choke cable and exhaust manifold when trying to repair it there. dont ever buy a honda 2hp 4 cycle engine if you intend to use it in an ocean. it might be ok in fresh water, but is a very stupid design for salt water. martinique is a state of france and so should have wonderful cheeses, pastrys, etc. we were disappointed in the pain au chocolat (chocolate stuffed croissants) which sure didnt taste like it was genuine french. we went to a town in the north east corner that had been totally destroyed by a volcano eruption in 1902 killing 30,000 people. only 2 people survived, one a prisoner who was deep in his cell and the other barrel maker who was in his cellar. the prisoner guy later joined the circus and showed off his burns. when we arrived in antigua we started to go into english harbor where the race headquarters is, but it was so crowded that i was nervous driving in and having to back out or turn around in close quarters. so we bailed and went to falmouth harbor next door which is much bigger and was less crowded. we are about the last boat out, a long haul in our sick dinghy. the races start tomorrow, details next edition. hugs. -evi