20th December

12 00 N
61 46 W

Weather: sunny with late rain, wind n/a, waves n/a

Well this was a different sort of Sunday for us. As I have said in previous posts the West Indies Brewery has closed its doors for the time being due to a covid outbreak at a local resort and the ramped up restrictions on gatherings, restaurants and the like. The impact for us was that we couldn't make our usual Sunday pilgrimage for brunch and some big screen sports viewing with a few beers thrown in for good measure nor would we be able to stock up on eggs, bread and local vegetables as the market that runs within the brewery grounds on a Sunday was also closed down, it left a big hole to fill! The other person that it impacted on was our regular taxi driver, Joel, he was losing out on a fare for the day - another economic victim in the making. Gerry had decided that we would host a brunch on our boat instead to fill the void. We had a small breakfast of fruit and coffee knowing that the brunch would be more than enough for the day - it beats me how anyone can eat what we had for brunch and then eat a further two meals later in the day - I would have had indigestion for days! Any way we had agreed on an 11am time slot and began arranging the cooking schedule to fit that time, give or take half an hour! Gerry was cooking as he thinks he's the breakfast master, I was left to supervise and organize everything so that it was all done at the same time and served up hot as if it had been left to Gerry we would have had things cooked in stages and every pot, pan and utensil in the entire boat vying for space on the 3 burner stove top. We ended up cooking up sausages, bacon, hash browns, English muffins, scrambled eggs with cheese, roasted balsamic tomatoes and homemade baked beans and it all made it to the table together cooked and hot! Dale and Lorie arrived just before it was ready and had brought champagne and orange juice for us to drink. We sat out in the cockpit and made pigs of ourselves, enjoying the view, food and drinks until we were all sated the only thing missing was the large screen TV with sports showing oh and the market. Some-time after midday the Boyds returned to their boat as Dale had plans to do a small job of installing a fan, I can't remember where and I don't know for certain that he got it done as he was looking in need of a nana nap by that point anyway. Gerry and I set about clearing up the kitchen mess (it really wasn't too bad considering) and doing the dishes. Once we were done and everything was tidied away we relaxed with our electronic devices for a while until I finally decided that a nana nap was a good plan as it was now raining quite heavily and going outside was not going to happen.
The rain stopped and the sun came back out for a while and the clock eventually ticked around to cocktail hour, Gerry poured us each a drink and we made our way out to the cockpit just as another deluge arrived, much bigger this time and the rain was driving in to the cockpit as we hadn't closed up our enclosure curtains - every seat except the one by the companionway was soaked so sitting outside became pretty untenable almost immediately and we returned to below decks once more with drinks in hand. Neither of us wanted much for dinner, we were still full from brunch, so it was a good job that there was some left over curry to split between us from my meal the other day. We watched some more Netflix series episodes before finally dropping into bed. It was a very strange Sunday for us, we really needed to find something else to do (if only I could persuade Gerry to play scrabble!) but at least we managed a decent brunch. So it wasn't particularly exciting but everyone has those sorts of days. On the up side our water tanks are both now full to the brim thanks to the rain today and, fingers crossed, the leak repair seems to be holding up OK!
For today's advent photo I've chosen our communications equipment. At the top left hand side you can see our satellite phone in its cradle, I blanked out the number as we don't need any prank calls in the middle of the night thank you! The picture at the top right is of our VHF radio which most inter-boat/ dock/marina/low flying planes communication is done through, as you can probably see and possibly know, it is set on channel 16 - the universal hailing channel, if you are hailed then you usually agree to a change of channel to free the hailing channel of chatter - not that everyone actually does this and that becomes a nuisance to others trying to hail someone. The radio is located in our nav. station so we also have an extension mic/receiver in the cockpit next to the helm so that we can talk to others from the vantage point of the helm station, this isn't always as clear as the Nav. station receiver so we sometimes have to go below and use the equipment there. In addition to being able to hail other boats on this, the radio gets used for things like the cruisers networks - where local events and happenings around the place are announced at a set time, on a different, set channel - we have even had quiz nights in certain places over the VHF. A lot of boats leave their VHF radios turned on all the time so they don't miss anything, we leave ours off unless we are underway as the constant chatter becomes very distracting.
At the bottom of the picture is our single side band radio (SSB), with our call sign above it. This radio acts as a Ham radio and has a greater range but you need to know who you are trying to contact and their call sign if you want to speak to someone in particular. Ours is registered in the USA as that was where we were originally registered and you need a radio operators license for it. We tend not to use this radio but if push came to shove at least we have it available for use. I guess I should have included a set of signaling flags in this photo but to be honest I only just thought about it and we don't actually have a complete set anyway! There are a few other bits that have just come to mind but I might save them for tomorrow's photo, if I can find all of them - it might be hunt the thimble time!