We've enjoyed our time back on land, there's a lot to be said for air conditioning, electricity, and American grocery stores. I apparently couldn't handle not having boat projects to consume my time, so I managed to find a boat project I could work on in Phoenix. I built a new salon table for the boat. I've always hated the table on the boat which is just plain gray formica. I wanted a nice wood tabletop that would match the rest of the interior woodwork on the boat. So, I designed and built a new table made of cherry with a maple inlay. In the process I managed to cut my thumb with a chisel requiring hand surgery. Yep, three years on a boat with no problems, I come home and suffer a major injury on a boat project. Anyway, the table turned out pretty good, you can hardly see the blood stains.
The front room of our house has a growing mound of engine parts, watermaker filters, boat electronics, and assorted other boating paraphernalia. The UPS guy is well familiar with our address since he is making pretty much daily deliveries. All of this is going to get packed up and carted to PR in November. Between the two of us, we can bring four 50 pound bags, and I plan to use every last pound of our checked baggage allowance. The table is too big to check as baggage, so I am going to have to build a crate for it and ship it to PR by freight (hopefully keeping all 10 fingers in the process).
You may have noticed that our blog format has changed a bit. The banner at the top now shows Solstice's current location along with the local weather conditions. We can report our location by texting twitter and it will automatically update the blog, so our location reports should be more frequent now. On the left, you see a random slideshow of photos taken by other people within 5 miles of Solstice's location. This will give you some idea of what the vicinity of the boat looks like. Remember, we didn't take these and have no idea what might pop up here, so if you see a fat guy in a thong, don't blame us. Also on the left is a marine weather forecast. On the right is the same old filmstrip of recent photos, but now if you mouseover them you'll see a larger version with a description. I hope you've got broadband. I've tested all this in IE 7/8, Firefox and Chrome so hopefully the new content works for everybody.
We're planning to spend the entire cruising season (Nov-June) in the area of Puerto Rico and the US/British Virgin Islands. After seeing pretty much the entire Eastern Caribbean, this area is one of our favorites. There are lots of great anchorages, awesome diving, restaurants and bars, boat facilities, and grocery stores. Also, having US mail service nearby makes shipping parts and getting mail easy. Flying in and out of San Juan is cheap and convenient ($450 from Phoenix) so we are hoping to have plenty of visitors. Now accepting reservations . . .
