Home Office
As usual, the morning hours were spent in the virtual remote office in Europe while the sun shone here in the Caribbean.
I’d used a large and cheap tarpaulin on my deck during storage in the yard on Carriacou. That single small act has turned out to have large consequences down the road. The tarp didn’t last long and shredded into a fine stringy confetti which has penetrated into every corner of Zanshin and is proving well-nigh impossible to remove. I’ve collected it in dustbins, vacuum it up and picked up single strands but it seems to be reappearing overnight. I fear it will be years before it is (almost) gone.
Lunch
After work I put the 3 diesel canisters in the dinghy, along with my remaining 4 old batteries and headed into Island Waterworld to fill up the former and dispose of the latter. With my 60l of diesel in the dinghy, I went to the IGY Marina dock and asked about pricing for dockage. Even with discounts, it was about US$3 per foot per night plus electricity and water and that is too much for the comfort that the marina offers.
My webcam had expired in storage, so I walked up the road to the local electronics store and purchased both a new webcam and a USB-Hub for my computer. As there is just one main road, it is busy at most hours of the day and the early afternoon was no exception.
Later
I worked a bit more in the virtual office and then played around with the wonderful data that my new Victron system is providing. Starlink emailed me my monthly bill and I was shocked at the cost. After recovering from my incipient heart attack, I researched a bit and learned a very valuable lesson. When offshore, one can turn on “Priority Minutes” that get billed at US$2/Gb. I’d activated that option when I sailed here, but I’d assumed as soon as I was back “on land” as far as Starlink was concerned, I would no longer be charged those offshore minutes. That was a big mistake, as those minutes continued racking up while the option was turned on. I’d been doing my videoconferences and other internet stuff and had managed to rack up 80Gb in a month. Ouch.
Night
I joined the other reprobates at the Soggy Dollar Bar for happy hour and then three of us went to have a quick gyros meal across the road.