Sewing and appliance fixing

Thursday & Friday 10-11 Mar, Honduras days 8 & 9, Guanaja: Gusty winds continue. Sewing machine comes out. Washing machine gets some action. Microwave dies. Green flash … did we actually see it? And evening socializing at End of the World’s Tiki Bar.

We remain anchored next to Michael’s Rock. The previous evening, we had moved Cloudy Bay by just 200m thinking it looked more sheltered, only to find the gusts continued to hit us as hard as ever. The grass was not any greener! So, another 2 days of very gusty easterly winds. The water is calm because we are totally in the lee of the island, but the gusts are barreling down from the hillside in front of us.

Thursday was particularly windy. We didn’t even try to leave the boat. Instead, the sewing machine comes out. There are always lots of sewing projects on the to-do list and today I want to make a new cover for the life raft and 2 covers for the dinghy spare fuel cans. This is because where they sit, in the transom, they get full sun when the swim platform is down, and they quickly deteriorate. For the life raft cover I simply unpick all the stitching from the old one to make patents for the panels, but for the fuel cans I have to make the design myself. Once the first one is made, we joke that it looks like a little toy house. Maybe I should draw some windows on it! The job takes most of the day and same as every time I pull out the sewing machine, it takes a bit of swearing before I remember exactly how it all works and I get back into the groove of canvas work. So, frustrating at first, but once the projects are finalised I find it very satisfying in the end.

Meanwhile, Oana is tackling the laundry. After several years she has now made friends with our little washing machine and seems quite happy to use it. The loads it can take are quite small, but it washes well and uses a surprisingly small amount of water and power. And today, with the breeze blowing strong through the boat, even towels dry in a matter of an hour or 2.
And at the same time Oana also bakes bread and a cake. So the boat is full of smells today. New canvas fabric, fresh laundry, and best of all, baking! Yummy!

The dark spot of the day is that the microwave seems to have finally quit. Over the last few weeks, it has occasionally given a glitch, but now it’s firmly dead. We guessed that one day this would happen, given this item is a simple household microwave. There is nothing marinized about it. In previous years, we had thought about having a second one on board as backup. But the enclosure that it sits in, surrounded by the usual high quality teak cabinetry means the microwave has to be a certain size. And search as we might, we could never find such a small microwave on the market, and the cabinetry is definitely not getting altered to house a bigger one.
With Thursday being taken up with sewing and laundry, Friday become the “microwave day”. It’s one of the few pieces of equipment that I have yet to remove or tinker with. Luckily its removal is fairly straight forward, and it is soon on the operating table (saloon dining table) with its covers off. I’m hoping it is simply a fuse blown of a bad connection. But I see nothing obvious. I can trace the 220vac power into the main PCB (printed circuit board) but beyond that my electronics expertise ends. All I can do is pull and replace each and every electrical connection that I can find and hope for the best. Then, suddenly the light comes on, there is “ding” (like “your food is ready”) and it’s back to life. I’m not sure exactly what I did, but happy that it’s back to life. Though, of course, once installed back into the galley, it stops working again. Hmmmm. Some you win, some you lose. Looks like we will have to restart our search for a new one.

In the late afternoon we take the dinghy down the coast where these is a gazebo on the end of a jetty and where we observed we could get phone signal the other day. We sit there, in the shade and cooling wind, reading the news and catching up on other internet activities.

While we have been in Guanaja, most days the sun has set straight into the sea with nothing obscuring it. It’s always a wonderful sight and on a boat tends to be a daily ritual to watch it. Like many, we have heard of the green-flash effect just as the last of the sun pops below the ocean, but try as we might, we have never actually seen it. In these 2 days I think I might have actually seen it! Not with the naked eye, but through binoculars. Careful to not start looking until the sun has almost gone (so as not to damage my eyes) I believe I saw a greenish glow that lasted for about 1 second. Will have to try again tomorrow to be sure it was not just part of my imagination.

Then in the evening we head off to the End of the World dive resort for a drink in their Tiki Bar. Today there are 2 guests there and also the owner, Brian, who lives with his young family in this remote corner of the island, where they get power from a generator, water by RO and with no road, everything has to be brought in by boat. Some would say this is an existence in paradise.
They have accommodation of up to 12 diving guests which he charges $1650 per person per week, including all food, drinks and 2 dives a day. Frankly that seems very good value to us.
He suggests us to join them tomorrow for a dive. Let’s see if this damned wind has calmed down tomorrow.