Huntington – travel arrangements and ruined laptop

Tuesday 18 September: Rainy day in Huntington – travel arrangements, ruin the laptop and admin.
Strong wind woke us up throughout the night, with gusts shuddering the rigging. In the morning, we are surprised to see half clear sky, rays of sunshine and warm wind. Where is the rain that was supposed to come and rinse our fittings?
Very protected harbor here. Other than the wash from the passing boats, nothing disturbs Cloudy Bay.
We go briefly ashore to check in and see Huntington Yacht Club, which is a very nice facility, same as all the yacht clubs we visited in USA so far. And as a plus, they also have a great swimming pool here! Not that we will jump in it in a hurry!
Armed with the WiFi password, we take the launch boat back to Cloudy Bay, to test the all-singing-all-dancing new Red Box which we installed in Newport. The result: internet is lightning fast if we connect the WiFi antenna straight to the laptop, and it is hardly connecting if the antenna goes through the Red Box. What a surprise! Not! Bummer…yet another call needed to the mailasail, who sold it to us, saying everything would work so much better via a RedBox.
Soon after that all our travel arrangements to NYC are completed, with accommodation and train into Manhattan booked. We go tomorrow morning. Oana is beyond herself, as this trip will be her treat.
Mid-day the rain starts. Perfect, we will have a desalted boat at the end of it. So we hope! It is pouring so hard that the decks get flooded. Glen finds this rain quite appealing, so he lowers the dinghy and gives Cloudy Bay’s hull a once around with the sponge. Nutty man! 🙂 A couple of hours later he is satisfied with the result of his scrub, Cloudy Bay’s waterline is now weed-free and the whole top sides cleaned and rinsed off. He finally returns to dry saloon like a drowned rat …. but happy with his effort.
And to warm up, let’s have a tea. But there is an incident of mid-communication and 1/3 of the cup of tea spills directly onto the laptop keyboard. It indeed warms us up as we run around to towel dry the keyboard and save what we can. Bugger!!! And so for several good hours there is an IT workshop on Cloudy Bay: we take the laptop apart while watching YouTube videos of how to do it. Then we blow dry all we can. When we put it back together, we can power it ok, but the keyboard doesn’t work. Only few keys are good, the rest have no function, type the wrong letter, or type continuously row after row of letters. Hm, not good at all. Just when we had great internet!!! This is a conspiracy? Or just 2 pairs of clumsy hands onboard!
As a result, we order a new keyboard online. eBay is amazing and eBay inside USA even more so. Just type in the DELL laptop model and “keyboard” and multiple vendor options pop up. We soon have one ordered, to arrive in 3 days, free shipping and total only $18!! If this were a yacht dedicated piece of electronics it would probably be $1000 and takes weeks to order and deliver, and that’s if you could even find someone selling the part!
The rest of the evening is rather quiet, we are both a bit annoyed. We really wanted to upload the next video to You Tube. The upload itself would have worked OK, but without a keyboard we could not type any description or key words. So we are snookered on that one.
We finish packing, shut down the day fridge and freezer, and run the generator to top up batteries. We will leave the boat with 1 fridge and auto bilge pump only so that the batteries last for 4 days.
Tomorrow we head to New York for 4 days, and we will resume the blog when we get back on board Cloudy Bay, on Monday.