Oh-dark-thirty
The music had gone on until 02:00 last night, but the earplugs helped me sleep. I was up and about just after 05:00 and I thought it would be good to get started early. The weather forecast still showed very light winds and sunshine for the upcoming day and I wanted to try to minimize my time belowdecks. I was on my second coffee by the time my first conference call started at 07:00.
I went topsides for the first bridge opening of the day to make sure I wasn’t blocking anyone in the channel. The first departing boat from my area certainly caught my eye – not due to her size, but the name! Who’d name a large yacht like the one above Shake N’ Bake TBD?
It remained calm outside but turbulent at work a couple of thousand miles away. I tried hard, but seemed to make absolutely no progress with the new software from IBM – for every conversion/migration problem I fixed it seemed that two others popped up and each successive one became more difficult to diagnose and fix.
Noon
I’ve been making only negligible progress at work, but took break to go up topsides and get some fresh air. Some interesting big boys came and went and the AIS shows a couple anchored close to the entrance and perhaps they’ll attempt to enter with the last bridge of the day, 17:00.
Afternoon
I had a long day at work, and finally logged off at 15:30. I had little energy left, but managed to do a bit of wiring on the dodger solar panels. They’ve lost a lot of capacity and instead of putting each one on a separate MPPT controller, I’ve chosen to parallel them onto one controller. That allows the power to reach the “charge” level more often and potentially gives the controller a better chance to charge the batteries than before.
Evening
I showered off the dirt from the day and went ashore well before the 5PM bridge opening. I chose to watch it from opposite the Sint Maarten Yacht Club to get a different viewpoint and it turned out to be a good choice, as several large yacht came in, including Slipstream.
The procession took a while, as many of the incoming yachts went slowly and waited for their predecessor to make it through. The crowd at the SMYC enjoyed the show, as did the crews aboard. Probably excepting the captain, as entering the lagoon is always a stressful time for those in charge.