Night
Work and no play this coming day are going to be tough to achieve, particularly the work part. I now know that the loud noises from ashore the previous day were just the sound check for the main event. There was a concert ashore that lasted until about 03:00 with several bands. Some of them bad, others worse. All of them were loud and easily circumvented my earplugs and buzzing fan. I didn’t hear the bass beat as much as feel my body and the whole boat vibrate.
Morning
Waking up for my 06:00 conference call was difficult, and I joined it somewhat late. It had already ended early, and nobody had missed me – I could have gone back to bed. But I’d made and drunk some coffee already so that was no longer an option.
The StarlinkRV antenna is underway. When I ordered the DHL courier and paid the not insignificant expedited fee, the expected delivery was Friday by end-of-day. The minute I’d actually forked over the payment that slipped to end-of-day the following Monday. I’ll wait and see how long the shipment actually takes before complaining, but I’m not too sanguine about the chances of the delivery happening earlier.
My connection using a SIM card and MiFi device is generally pretty good, but at times the Digicel network must get heavily loaded and the latency time goes up. This is not a problem when browsing web pages or when reading/writing e-mails, but when typing code into a remote computer using PuTTY and the vi editor it becomes a bit challenging. Many times, I’ll have typed something but don’t see an echo until a second or so later and this generates lots of frustrating typos.
Despite the very old text-based technology mentioned above, my work currently uses bleeding-edge technology such cloud computing with OpenShift containers, virtualization, big data, etc. But when it comes down to the nitty-gritty grunt work, there’s nothing as efficient as the old Mark-IV text bash session. Today will certainly be all work and no play.
Lunch
The new toilet has survived the 24-hour soak test with nary a drop of leakage. I bolted everything back together and replaced the toilet seat hinges with new ones. The old ones are yellowed and cracked plastic and crumbled as I took them apart.
Afternoon
I took my spare fuel tank ashore to the fuel dock as I wanted to fill up, but they were already closed at 14:00. I returned to the boat and had a lunchtime sandwich at Jambe de Bois. It is now 16:30 and the loud music has started up on the beach already; my stereo cannot compete without being dialed to an almost painful volume. The weather reports show that there is still a 1.5M or more north swell with a 14 second period so I’m not going to relocate. I do want to get further from the beach but all the nicer spots outside are taken. It is going to be another earplug night, unfortunately.
Evening
The high stratus has lowered to nimbostratus (drizzly rainclouds) and that will be my savior. The music volume has decreased, and I’d be surprised if there was any crowd at the open-air event. It looks like the clouds will pass by in a couple of hours, but that should be enough. It has turned into a day with work and no play, but there will be better ones ahead.
Night
Promptly at 22:00 as I was drifting off to sleep the boat shuddered as the bass speakers ashore buzzed to life. In went the earplugs but I could still hear the bad electronically generated drum rhythm. Fortunately, it only lasted until 01:00 this time and I could remove the plugs and get a quiet night of sleep.