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| View from our hotel |
We happened to arrive in Trinidad on a Friday. . . which means no one will work until Monday of course! Not to mention carnival was in a weeks time which means Trinidad shuts down for a week and nobody comes to work! Our first stop from the airport was to the doubles stand. . . we love doubles! Doubles is a local Trini dish (commonly had for breakfast) consisting of flat fried bread filled with curried chickpeas. . . super delicious. We arrived at the little Peakes Boat Yard hotel and proceeded to spend the weekend scrubbing the decks and turning Jangles from brown back to her normal self once again.
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| Enjoying a nice cold beer |
We started checking things to see what worked and what didn’t. . . boaters know there is something that always won’t work! We tested out the starboard engine which ran beautifully but when we tried to start the port engine. . . uh-oh . . . white smoke was coming out of the intake! Needless to say, after taking the entire thing apart, we found the problem! Carbon and a stuck valve! We have our spare parts coming in and should hopefully have the engine back together and running in a week.
Next issue we found (the list goes on I tell ya) was a small water leak into the engine bay, naturally we thought it was coming from one of the water pipe valves put upon further inspection we found the source to be the hotwater geyser! After completely taking the geyser apart we eventually found the source of the leak which was fixed easily with a little welding.
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| Geyser being taken apart |
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| Inside the engine bay |
Covers being cleaned, generator poles being replaced, deck work to be done, polishing, viking 8 man life raft being rectified, fire bottles being inspected and electronics being tested, thru hull fittings, seacocks, engine services etc, along with the multitude of tick boxes to be ticked. Once all these bits and bobs are completed we can hopefully splash with no more issues and start our cruising season up the islands.
Being from South Africa of course, where our exchange rate has recently crashed, everything in Trinidad has become a lot more expensive. Not to mention, just as we arrived here they began a compulsory 12.5% VAT on all work and products sold in the marine industry. . . Cha Ching! We have found, this time especially, that one of our major expenses is food. . . the cost of food is outrageous, especially at restaurants. So we got the gas working swiftly on the boat and did a bit of provisioning and needless to say as my mother is not here, I have now become chief chef, laundromat and bottle scrubber. Food is still extremely expensive to buy, but it’s a bit of a relief to eating in restaurants all the time. I mean for example the average price of dinner at a restaurant is between 80 - 200 TT, which in Rands would be between R190 - 490 for one restaurant meal!.
We moved out of the hotel and onto the boat once I had 2 cabins cleaned thoroughly, what a job that was! It took me an entire day to unpack my suitcases, trying to find places to put everything! Needless to say. . . which is usually the case . . . I brought way more stuff than I will ever need! Anyway, we are finally unpacked and settled in nicely aboard Jangles. . . although I am sure we will sleep far better when we are floating.
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| Luggage to be packed away |
We haven’t been all work and no play, we’ve had a little fun in the evenings with our Canadian friends Krista and Bill from Secoudon! They were already on the water by the time we had arrived so I got a little break from being a chef every second or third night as we would have dinner on their boat. Dinner, however, would also be accompanied by copious amounts of fantastic caribbean rum! We had great fun with Secoudon who left Trinidad yesterday. . . so sad. . . but we are hoping to catch up to them up island when we finally get Jangles in the water. . . fingers crossed it will be soon! Thats all for now, it’s time for dinner duty, testing out the grill for the first time with some delicious hamburgers!
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| My dad and Bill |
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| Krista and me |
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