09/01/2009, Aruba
Rich trying to work on the blog, yeah right
We left Santa Cruz Bay at 4:30am and arrived at Aruba at 3:15pm same day. This was another of those hard to see entrances and the charts and marking were not clear at all. We hailed the Poet Authority to help describe which markers were which. He said he would send out a pilot boat to bring us in rather than try to explain the markings. This was a great help we followed the pilot through a different entrance and tied up at the Customs dock. This is a very industrial dock except for the cruise ships near by. After checking in we walked to the marina to look at it and decided we would not go there. They had only one slip and it would be very difficult to get our boat in there.
As we were pulling away from the custom's dock the bow thrusters stopped working, but we decided to keep going anyway. About 5 minutes away from the dock heading to the anchorage Pat checked out our anchor windlass and it was not working. We called the Port Authority back and ask if we could return to their dock to check everything out. The rest is a long story, but by the next day with the help of some real nice people we got everything working. In fact one of the guys called his buddy who works at the Shell refinery to see if they had a 400 amp fuse. There were none on the island, but his buddy called back and said they had three that they use in the plant. This is a very large amp fuse and not common. His buddy drove half way from the plant and we met him and I paid him for the fuses, I bought all three. That was just one example of the help we got. Anyway we went to the anchorage the next day with everything working fine.
Aruba is certainly tailored to Cruise Ship and the fly-in resort seekers. Lots of beautiful beaches and resort hotels and lots of Casinos. Conversely it is not what we would call cruiser-friendly. We had heard that not too many cruisers stop here because of this. As we said the people are super friendly it is just the conditions are not conducive to the cruiser types.
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08/31/2009, Curacao
We left Spanish Waters at 8:45am and arrived at Santa Cruz Bay at 2:30pm same day. We went up the coast of Curacao to anchor because it was 25 miles closer to Aruba and we could do it in one day without an overnighter. We were the only boat in the anchorage. It was very quiet and near a kinda resort beach. The Curacao Coast Guard arrived and boarded us. They were very pleasant and after they checked the boat out we sat and had a nice conversation.
This anchorage was nice because it was an easy out the next morning and we could leave in the dark without concern. This would allow us to get to Aruba in daylight.
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08/12/2009, Curacao
We left Bonaire at 6:00am and arrived at Curacao at 1:00pm same day. For some reason there or no cruiser's guide books for Curacao or Aruba. The paper charts as well as the chart plotter were off up to 3 miles in some areas. This presented a real problem when approaching land or entrance to anchorages etc. We were told that the entrance to Spanish Waters was hard find and not recognizable until right on top of it. That's ok if you know how to first get right on top of it. We proceeded very slowly as we thought we were approaching the general area, but still couldn't see the entrance. We finally saw a tug approaching from the opposite direction we were going along the coastline. We noticed he appeared to be turning in toward land so we watched carefully as we saw him swallowed up by an unseen opening in the rocks. We quickly followed in his direction and sure enough about 150 ft from shore you start to recognize an opening. The entrance inside was narrow but marked quite well to avoid running aground. So we did the usual one eye on the depth gauge and one on the markers and got the anchorage. We met up with Barbara and Michael from s/v Astarte and met Mike and Linda from s/v Casa Del Mar. The next morning we took the bus to town of Williamsted, about a 30 minute bus ride to do our check-in. It is a real nice town with a very Dutch architecture. You felt as if you were in Holland.
We anchored near the channel where the wind surfers surf and the small sailboats have their races. We were asked politely to anchor further away, but there wasn't any room for our 7ft draft. So we had a close up look at the races and wind surfers. I was able to get my laptop fixed (wouldn't turn on, or if it did, my wireless internet wouldn't work), I was told in Grenada that is was the mother board. Wrong, it was a small ribbon cable connecting the power-on switch to the mother board that was bad. The fan for the compressor for the refrigeration stop working. I hook up a temporary fix to get us to Cartagena. We also ran into Bob from s/v Pauwke, but his wife Mieke was home for a visit in Belgium.
We stayed for almost 3 weeks, partly waiting for a weather window.
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