On Tuesday, we tried to recover from having our bodies shaken and jostled by the ride around the island in the golf cart. We got up to the sound of rain hitting the deck! It's the first rain we've had in a long time and about all it did was turn our dirty decks to muddy decks. Little seemed to have gotten washed away, just liquified so every where you walked on deck, you left muddy foot prints. Hopefully we will get some more but since then all we've gotten is wind and lots of it. It's forecast for "small craft" warnings for the next week or so with winds in the mid 20 knot range and seas in the two plus meter size. We're protected from most of the swells but the wind just keeps on coming and that's fine as the DuoGen on the stern keeps trying to put volts into the batteries. No way it can keep up with the demand as it's not that good a generator. At least the winds in the 20's helps.

We made up some fresh gasoline(a mixture of 50 to 1-gas to oil) for our two stroke Tohatsu out board as we were getting a bit low with all the traveling around we've been doing. No way do we want to ever run out as we would be swept out so sea quickly with the winds and currents here in Bonaire. When we snorkeled along the south shore of the island just off shore, I sat in the dinghy while Tracy floated along beside me. Before I'd dropped the line to the small mooring buoy, she's drifted a good 100 yards to the west of me. It was just easier to float along in the dinghy while she swam as the water was too deep for any picture taking.

Once Puff was launched and the Tohatsu lowered and installed, we took off for the local marina to pay for our mooring for another two weeks and get rid of two bags of trash. Taking most of what we buy out of boxes while still at the store really cuts down on what we have to throw away. Keeps nasty bugs off the boat too since they seem to like to hitch a ride to the boat in the boxes. We paid our fees($154) for the next two weeks so we are good and got rid of the trash. I enquired about who maintains the moorings as ours is in need of repair. Mooring lines are supposed to have a eyelet installed on the end of the line that you pass one of your dock lines through. One of the two lines from the mooring doesn't have an eyelet, just a knot in the rope. I ended up speaking to the dock master for the marina and he told me he would have someone out there to get it fixed as soon as he could. No clue what that means in actual time as this is the Caribbean and not much moves quickly around here(it's now Thursday and no repairs have been done).
We returned to Zephyr and got the generator and a small tarp out so we could charge up everything on board and keep the generator dry should it rain again. Just the appearance of the tarp assured us that it would not rain again and it hasn't. We transferred gasoline from one of our forward jerry cans to one we keep on the stern that has a easy to pour handle. We poured fuel from one tank to the other and made sure the generator was nice and full. We ran the generator for about 90 minutes and most of what we had that needed charging got taken care of.
Lunch, always an important part of our day, was hamburgers made with the left over meat from the tacos we had on Sunday. Our trip to the grocery store yesterday gave us all the extra condiments we needed for a really great burger. We had it on simple sandwich bread instead of buns as it's much cheaper and tastes just fine. We'd bought a half loaf for $1.50 and it was just perfect. We've found that if we buy a full loaf, we can't eat it all and it goes bad quickly in the Caribbean as most of the bakeries don't use preservatives.
I'm off to take a few more Motrin to try and stop the body aching every time I move. Age sucks sometimes.

Yesterday, Wednesday, we went back to shore get our phone/internet recharged as we were down to just 320 megs of data left out of the 10 gigs we got back on the 8th. We'd been downloading another show or two(off ITunes) and adding in all the surfing we've been doing learning about Bonaire, we'd gone through our allotment. One thing they didn't tell us at Digicel was that the plan we were on doesn't allow computers to connect to the phone you are using to get the internet via a "Hot Spot". It says it's connected(via WIFI) but there is no internet. We discussed this problem with the sales person and she confirmed what we already knew. You can't get internet under the plan we were on unless you put the simm card in a WiFi dongle that will broadcast the signal. Then you can connect to the dongle, just not the phone. Why??? The sales person had no clue, it's just the way Digicel does it here. At least we had the WiFi dongle and didn't have to buy another piece of electronics to add to our vast collection.

We found another problem that needed attention on board. When I pulled out Tracys buoyancy compensator jacket(holds her scuba tank when she dives) we found that another of the air dump valves had come off(not supposed to do that). We'd originally found the problem of these valves coming off back in Madagascar and had taken the jacket into a repair shop when we were in South Africa. The tech was amazed how bad the condition of the valves were as the jacket looked brand new. We'd bought it two years before then and brought it back to Fiji when we were there. After usage, it always got washed in fresh water and dried in the cockpit(out of the Sun) and then stowed in the locker in the forward head(same as mine). The tech did a good job on the valves that looked like they needed replacing or reglueing. Unfortunately, the one that has now popped, isn't one of the ones he fixed. We needed another repair person or we needed a new jacket($$$$). We did some research on the internet, found a repair shop and called. He said he needed to see it so we jumped in the dinghy and took it to him. He was also surprised at the blown valve as the jacket, now four years old, still looks new. His comment was that most of the companies were using cheap rubber from China(his opinion) and many jackets were doing the same thing. His suggestion was to just eliminate the valve by glueing a patch right over the hole. But---he had no glue nor any patch material! So much for a suggestion. He did have a rack full of new jackets and surprisingly not a very inflated prices. We checked when we got back to Zephyr on the internet and his prices were in line with those back in the US. Quite the surprise. We knew of two other places in town that might fix it so we jumped back into Puff and took off for down town. The next place we stopped at had no suggestion(other than take it back to where we had just come from) other than buy a new one. Their prices were higher than where we had just been for a new jacket(nicer place with higher rent). We left and hiked down to store #3 and after the tech(owner of the store) looked at it, he had some suggestions as to where to get glue but again, he had no patch material. He took pity on us and started hunting around the different drawers in his shop and came up with a replacement valve. We pulled out the bad glue that had held the old valve and then he slowly fit the replacement valve in place and screwed down the valve cap onto the inner fitting, took the jacket to a spare scuba tank and inflated it. The valve leaked just a little so he tightened the fitting and the small hiss we had heard stopped!! It was fixed, not permanently but it was good to go for diving. He said he would look around his shop to see if he had any valves that might fit better and to stop by on the weekend(Sunday) and see what he came up with. To say we were impressed with his service would be an understatement! He could have just thrown up his hands as the previous two shops had and tried to sell us a new jacket. If it doesn't work out, well we know know where we will be buying a new jacket on Sunday but today we will be jumping in the water after lunch and trying it out. It's blowing in the high teens to twenties so the water is quit stirred up out there with lots of white capped waves running through the bay so we will just dive from Zephyr again and see how it is. Tracy did go into the water on Wednesday morning for a test dive to see how her ear was and she reports back that it's better than she thought and equalized even better the deeper she goes. One other thing we did buy at the third dive shop was some more weights for our diving($25 for two 2 pound weights). We now seem to be having a problem sinking once we let all the air out of the compensators so we got four more pounds to try and counteract the buoyancy problem.
Today, we cleaned up and bit, ran the generator, petted(and annoyed)Blue as she laid on the table in the main salon and made preparations for this afternoons dive. Tracys tank is still full at 3,000 pound and mine is down to probably 2,000 with us both using it for two short dives. It's going to be fun getting back in the water again.
The picture today is of the sign outside the "Mens Room" at the National Park on the northwest corner of the island.