Sunrise
I woke up early and wanted to complain about the creaking and rolling here at anchor. But I remembered soon enough how fortunate I am in having a home-office in the sun and Caribbean warmth. That point was driven home when my first call of day was with a colleague who was talking about the heavy snowfall outside of her window. My 26C trumps her -2C every day of the week even if her monitor doesn’t need to be glued down to prevent it falling over.
Morning
So far today half of my work day has been spent in meetings. The other half is ahead of me and it will hopefully contains less calls and more work at the keyboard. Europe has, for the most, returned to summer time. This means that I get to wake up one hour earlier than before for meetings. Tomorrow I get to wake up early for a 3AM conference call.
Noon
I missed the opportunity to have Mark and Marjorie assist me in getting the genoa up. They’ve departed the anchorage for Philipsburg; but hopefully they’ll realize the error of their ways and return here soon.
After work had finished for the day I finally started the hull cleaning chore. I got my dive gear set up with the new BCD and put on my fins, mask and put the paint-scraper in an accessible location on the dive platform. Per my usual procedure, I inflated the BCD and pushed it off the back and jumped in afterwards. The plan was to put on the BCD and get to work; but it didn’t work out that way.
Hull Cleaning
The BCD sunk rapidly and I could just barely grab the octopus as it disappeared into the depths. One fin came loose but I chose to save the dive gear rather than the fin. It was hard work to surface while holding the heavy tank/BCD but I finally managed to grab onto the boat and remove the 2 lead weights from the pockets and inflate the BCD ALL the way to give it buoyancy.
I’d not put enough air into the new BCD and also misjudged how much weight I’d needed to add. I got that sorted and went looking for my errant fin below the boat, but couldn’t locate it. So I began cleaning with just one fin and did the rudder first. That had a lot of growth, but much of it was soft and it scraped away with relative ease. The bottom of the hull, on the other hand, had hard growth and was very difficult to remove. I used the whole tank of air for just the section aft of the prop shaft. What a lot of work.
I came up out of water and both the BCD and myself were covered in little wiggling larvae. A shower off the back of the boat didn’t remove all the nasty critters. I had to scrub and clean in the inside shower afterwards. A Q-Tips and removed one specimen from my ear. Yuck. I am going to get a wetsuit for the next round, or decided to hire someone to do this work for me.
Afternoon and Evening
With a 3AM conference call planned for the next day I wanted this to be an early night. Consequently, after the obligatory 5PM inbound bridge opening I wanted to eat somewhere close by. I wandered to the Soggy Dollar to chat for a bit and then opted for the ribs at The Palms. They were, indeed, as good as everyone said they were.