26th November

12 00 N
61 46 W

Weather sunny, wind n/a, waves n/a

HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL OUR AMERICAN FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES, ENJOY THAT TURKEY!

Thanksgiving already, despite the difficulties this year has brought we are thankful that we are safe and well and that all our family and friends are managing to stay well and sane, as far as we know!. Our thankfulness extends to the Grenada community who have graciously allowed us to stop in their country and partake of their hospitality whilst trying to maintain the health and well- being of their own citizens, they could have been like so many other countries and closed their borders to us, leaving us with nowhere to shelter for the hurricane season, so our eternal thanks go to Grenada for your kindness and humanity in extending a welcome to us at this difficult time, you did a great job all round!
Well our Thanksgiving Day was going to be very quiet, we had only one plan for the day and that was to pick up the fridge guy and make sure that we got the fridge and freezer up and running today. Gerry got a phone call to say that they were at the dock and could he fetch them out to our boat, he was gone only a matter of minutes and returned with one of the guys who was here yesterday, it was less than ten minutes and he had looked at Gerry's wiring, checked everything was running as expected, checked that both the fridge and freezer were getting down to temperature and turning off OK according to what the thermostat was set at and he OK'd everything and was ready to return to the dock. So at least we have the official nod and it's all covered by warranty. After dropping him back to shore Gerry was keen to get the shelving into the fridge and freezer so that we could start putting stuff back where it belongs. Luckily he hadn't disposed of the original shelving (it was contemplated as the space is now greater and we thought we might need a different shelf arrangement) the old shelving would work with a couple of minor adjustments. The shelves went in and we waited a bit longer so that the new plates could work their magic and bring the interior temperatures closer to where we wanted them to be before adding our food supplies. Whilst we were waiting we attacked the "emergency freezer" and began to load the stuff from that into the insulated bag to move it to the newly refurbished freezer. We had noticed an unpleasant smell in the freezer which I think I mentioned a couple of days ago, it was still present and we needed to find the cause of it so as each item was removed from the freezer we sniffed and prodded it to see if anything was obviously not quite as it should be. My nose is much better than Gerry's when it comes to unpleasant smells but even I couldn't decide where the smell was coming from, I did however find 2 bags of burgers that weren't frozen solid so I binned those, everything else made it into the bag. Once the freezer was down to temperature we removed everything from the bag and re wrapped everything in new freezer bags in case the smell was coming from something that had spilt on the bags and then put it all in the freezer. Next came the restocking of the fridge - the shelf was in place and we had more space than previously so we decided to trial a new system of baskets in the fridge to see if we could make that work. It took a few goes and different combinations to come up with the (maybe) final arrangement, it's a bit hard to tell as we haven't got half the stuff we normally keep in the fridge at present - we need to do a stock up shop and soon. Everything we had that need to go into the fridge was now in place, the thermostats were set and we then left everything to do its best whilst we turned our emergency Freezer back into a fridge and loaded it up with what we had left in the way of drinks. I sat and wrote blog notes and spent an age trying to upload a few photos of the fridge and freezer progress on an excruciatingly slow internet, by the time I had finished the upload it was 4.30pm and Gerry called it 5 O'clock somewhere - it's a good job our Covid affected clock reads 5 O'clock or we wouldn't have any excuse! So we went out into the cockpit with adult beverages in hand and sat enjoying the cool of the late afternoon and eventually the sunset, which was closely followed by a very dark cloud forming over top of us and then it began to rain - time to get back down below, close the hatches and have dinner! All evening Gerry kept watch and worrying over the fridge and freezer temperatures, well we had paid a great deal of money for the system and he wants to be certain that it's going to do the job!
On a final note - we didn't have the makings for a thanksgiving dinner, no sign of turkey, cranberry sauce and fixings and definitely no pumpkin pie - we had to make do with Moussaka but we are thankful that we had anything at all to eat given the state of our stores at present. We hope you all enjoyed your thanksgiving meal and had a great day to reflect on the things that we should never take for granted!