February 20. Boat Yard

As you see we're still alive!!! Sorry for not updating our Blogg for sooooo long.

Wow, are we on a schedule or what, I don’t know where to begin in filling you in what’s been going on since my last entry.

Schedule:

Sunday: potluck at Maremares

Monday: late afternoon Manuela teaches English in a private school

Tuesday: Tivi our maid is here so one of us has to stay home, usually Manuela

Wednesday: late afternoon English classes again

Thursday: Mississippi Marble Night (a fun dice game)

Friday: Tivi is here again

Saturday: 9 am private English class with a parent

In-between Sid is mostly all day long in the yard working on the boat or working on projects at home. He polished some of our stainless steel. No polisher?!! Well, this one works just fine!

Manuela has lots of sewing projects and when we relax with a cocktail in the evening we wonder how we ever fit work into our busy schedule. (The last project she needed plenty of help).

The English teaching is really fun although the 4 to 8 year olds are little monsters and hard to control, their attention span is about as long as I can say a sentence.

I teach ten 4 to 8 year olds one hour each of the two days and 1 ½ hours to six 11 year old girls or shall I say teenagers, a challenge in itself? The school now is trying to talk me into doing an adult class, no way Jose, after the little monsters I’m pooped. But one of the parents is taking private lessons on Saturday.

The yard work is coming along slowly but great. Paradise is finished with her new paint job and looks just incredible. The brown is a lot lighter than before but it’s a beautiful mocha color we love better. The rudder still needs to be painted and the bottom is next. While painting the rudder they dropped it and so they had to fix some cosmetic dents, but no harm done, just a bit of a delay that’s all. Sid also was able to bend the strut back to almost where it should be but has to replace the cutles bearing, we hoped the shaft was not bent, but when we ran the engine and ran it in gear the noise was just gut wrenching and told us that we need a new shaft. We then pulled the shaft out and yep it looked pretty bad. As Sid tried to get the coupling out it broke so he had to cut the shaft to get it out. Now we really need a new shaft, a new coupling and a new bearing. The shaft is 30 years old and badly worn anyway. At least we're at the right place to get it fixed. Cruising is finding tropical places to work on your boat.

The guys at the yard are working very hard and are doing a great job. Unfortunately this is the windy season and so they had to postpone the painting on some days. The wind blew so hard that each time they had to re-tape the paper as the wind shredded it. It was really interesting to see the stages of the painting process, especially seeing the boat in snow white.

We’re not just working our butts off, a few weeks back we took a break and drove to Colonia Tovar with some friends (Dale and Sandy “Snow White”, Jim “Three Keys” and Chris and Luima). We had a wonderful time. Colonia Tovar is a German settlement and when you first see it you think you just landed somewhere in the mountains in Germany or even Switzerland until you hear the Spanish. It’s nestled in a valley high up the mountains some 2 hours West of Caracas, the most beautiful little town with little Chalets. I felt right at home. We staid at the Bergland Hotel with cozy rooms and big balconies with the most incredible view over the whole village and valley. The most incredible thing was to see all the hummingbirds (cklick on photos to see bigger) in the most beautiful colors. The hotel kitchen was so wonderful we never ate anywhere else for dinner. You should have seen the pork shanks we devoured, it was a feast. The second night all of us ordered New York steaks, the best we’ve ever had. Shopping was fun too especially to visit the butcher stores and we all loaded up on all kind of yummy German sausages.

The drive to get there was quite challenging at times as we decided to bypass Caracas and took back roads. At certain places it was completely washed out, but luckily our two cars were four wheel drive and no big deal to plow through the muddy muck.

We’re still living in the house and in the mean time all our marina buddies have left cruising again, the marina seems deserted and we feel left behind, not a good feeling. Three Keys, Bird of Paradise, Brazil Nut and White Tiger are the only boats left and of course us. We will be in the house another 2 months as we still have a lot of work to do on the boat, varnish inside and out and other odds and ends. Then who knows, we may just stay or go island hopping for a little bit.

I still haven’t gotten used to having a maid, but it sure is nice to have one. We realized that we really don’t need her twice a week, but for 15 bucks a day it makes us fell good to give her a job. She’s not all too well educated and still after two months I cannot understand her Spanish. She’s so funny though, whenever she cleans the kitchen and finds a ¼ full bottle of coke, she shakes it madly and asks me: “is this coke still OK?” while still shaking it waiting for my answer, to which I started to answer: “Not anymore”.

We also had our Iranian friends over for dinner. They have been living in Maremares for months and the ladies miss cooking, so I told them that my kitchen was their kitchen. They cooked up the most incredible meal, it was wonderful. They can use my kitchen ANY time.

In the last couple of months a lot of businesses have been shut down for a couple of days, due to not paying taxes. Our hotel along with the grocery stores and restaurants we visit all were closed at the same time. It seemed that every good restaurant or store in town was shut down at the same time. The Bolivares in the meantime went from 3300 to 4500, good for us but unfortunately not for the poor people here, they can barley get by as it is. The Government has taken over so many businesses. Ernesto my Saturday student, the father of one of the little monsters has worked for a company for the last 12 years, now being taken over by the government as of May 1^st. He didn’t vote for El Presidente and therefore he knows he will be fired. Every person that didn’t vote for El Presidente will loose their job. We’ve met so many Venezuelan’s that lost their jobs due to that.

Oh by the way at one of the potlucks the kids had some fun with Sid.