Daily Archives: Friday February 24th, 2012

Cleaning the ship and a stroll with Pinguin

Today in the morning as Gui was busy getting everything together for her Visa application, the kids and me were strolling through the marina and looking at a very beautiful ship that’s lying on the next jetty. A beutiful and big schooner with the most amazing stern I’ve seen so far. But how unfortunate – the ship has not been moved in more than four years ! And nobody takes care of it. So it’s rotting away…. Poor thing  – they should give it to us, we could use a little extra space. Hehehe.

And then we were doing something we never did before: We CLEANED the Rancho Relaxo and her tenders ! While most of the boats around us are not sailed but only cleaned, we usually do ot the other way around. We sail a lot and let the spray and the rain do the cleaning. But since the water in this marina has too much chlorine to put it into our tanks, we used it (a LOT of it) to make the deck and cockpit white and shiny again. We also cleaned our two tenders and finally found the little hole where our deflatable has been loosing air the past two weeks.

After that much work we took Bruno’s little ‘Pinguin’ for a ride. We left the marina and went out to sea. But not very far as our destination was the river Chavon which we sailed up for about an hour. Unfortunately I couldn’t take any nice pics as I was busy handling the boat and the two kids at the same time. But it was a lot of fun and both kids enjoyed it very much.

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The cruise to the Dominican Republic

Sorry for the delay… But after three months of anchoring we finally arrived in a marina. And as it is… there’s NO Internet ! Pah ! On pretty much every anchorage we had access to the net using our amazing WLAN antenna – but here, where we actually pay for services like these there isn’t any net available. So now I sit in a bar while Gui and the kids watch a movie in the cinema. Also not too bad.

So here are a few pics. Not too many as there wasn’t much happening during the trip. The kids did some artworks using batting and glue while Gui and me were handling the sails. And this we did quite often. It’s amazing how the Rancho Relaxo changes during a few minutes. Passat sails up, down, Blister to starboard or to port. And the last night we were sailing on the wind. Especially our batteries liked these last hours. The wind generaor was working hard and the energy supply of our ship was filled up during those hours.

Which brings me to the next mood point about that marina: Of course they have different power connectors in the Dominican Republic but why don’t they provide adaptors for us poor european sailors ? Well, the sun is shining every day and the solar panels should do for now.

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