We're a boat again!
03 February 2007 | Crews Inn Marina, Trinidad
nice and sunny
Ursa Minor and her crew finally splashed on Wednesday and moved a few hundred feet across the bay to Crews Inn Marina, a very upscale place with free cable TV with more stations than we had in Michigan (although, alas, no Food Channel) and some nice activities aimed at cruisers: Mexican train dominoes on Sundays, Manager's Cocktail Party on Mondays, and barbecue potluck on Thursdays. Still lots of projects on-going including varnishing and installing the new bits of wood which will make the galley a bit more manageable and give us more room for books in the salon. I won't be able to unpack all the books I've amassed in various bags, but it will relieve the situation a bit. Got to have lots of books to cross an ocean! We're also working on getting insurance for our trip across the big pond - ugh, it's expensive and the exclusions and restrictions seem never ending. Lots of Carnival related activities going on daily, and we hope to get to a few but probably won't stay all the way through Carnival.
You might notice that the boat and the crew become almost interchangeable in these postings, and Ursa gets referred to at time as a person, and becomes personified as us -"we're a boat again". This use of language is pretty typical among us boaties - "we got an email from Tackless II", "we had dinner with Topaz the other night", etc. - a boat and its crew merge into one in our thinking and speech, as we do with our own boat "we've been a charter boat for years but now are cruising". It demonstrates how very much a part of our identity and life the boat is.
This next week I'll be getting organized with provisioning for our trip across the northern coast of South America to the Canal. We'll be able to do some more in Margarita, and the ABCs, so it won't be as massive as when we're about to head across the Pacific, but I'm treating it as a bit of a trial run. It's still hard to imagine what all I need to buy to prepare for months at sea and among small islands with not much available, and where I'll find room for it all aboard.