CURACOA MARINE
The boat is finally back in the water after a couple of frustrating days trying to motivate the boat yard personnel to complete the work that they had been given 4 months ago. In the end Penny had to give the final coat of antifouling to the hulls, just to speed up proceedings ( I might just mention here for our blog followers who are not boaties, that painting antifouling is like painting tar and I was given a 10cm roller to do the job. It took me two days in the searing unrelenting heat!!). Our launch wasn’t without incident as we motored off to our marine berth we discovered that the new prop was the wrong way around so instead of going forward we went back – very confusing!! Fortunately it was very easy to fix as all we had to do was to change the controls over. If all goes to plan we should be out of here by the beginning of next week.
The 13 hour flight from Sydney to San Francisco wasn’t the most enjoyable – we were both very tired when we got to our hotel at 10.00am. It was certainly a good idea to have a couple of day stop over to try and recuperate and get some local site seeing in. We explored the usual sites from Fishermans Wharf, China Town, the tram way and the highlight of the trip was Alcatraz. – famous for holding the birdman of Alcatraz, who was meant to be more evil that Hannibal Lectar, and Al Capone the gangster from the thirties.
Although we have only been in Curacao for a week we seem to have caught up with quite a few cruising friends, some we haven’t seen for over a year. On our flight from Miami to Curacao we saw Eduard and Marlene from Bibi; and in the same boat yard as us is Nancy and Dick from Askari who are getting ready to head west. Peter and Nani have been in Curacao for the last 9 weeks and have just left for Cartagena; hopefully we should catch up with them in the next few weeks.