I had intended on extending my car rental today, but the weather in the hills of Basse Terre didn’t look great and the rental agency had already found another driver for my car; so I opted to stay in the marina and do some final jobs on the boat in the air-conditioned comfort and still waters of the marina. I started up a crock-pot slow-cooker Chili cook with some of the local spices I’d gotten the day before and then planned the rest of the day. I moved Zanshin further from the dock so that I could lower the dive platform and replaced the transom shower assembly as the old hose had gotten soft and would often kink, then the dive platform itself got a good cleaning and some work with the toothbrush and rust-removal paste. The marina’s Wi-Fi was working for the first time since my arrival and Microsoft had decided to send me a 1Gb large fix release for Windows – but I think everyone else in the marina was using the internet as it was incredibly slow so that took a while (in fact it didn’t finish until about 3AM when I heard a “ding” go off on the computer).
I decided to get working on my fridge monitoring and control application, but I needed to get a couple of parts soldered together for the Arduino and since I’ve managed to collect a lot of little bits and pieces for the Arduino it took a lot of unpacking and searching to get the right components together and then figure out the wiring in the refrigerator’s compressor control board to get the communication working. These little projects with the Arduino always end up taking much longer than expected and I worked on my setup all afternoon until the sun was low enough on the horizon again to let me do some work on the outside of the boat. The final task for the day was to apply gel-coat cleaner/wax to the transom area, as that was looking both a bit dirty and chalky.
Happy hour arrived and I got the dive platform raised again and moved Zanshin closer to the docks again. The chili had been cooking all day and the smell made me quite hungry, but I managed to hold back and only taste-test the chili and made a simple dinner of two eggs in bagels before watching an episode of a television series on the computer and reading a bit.
