Thursday 16 Apr, CY 33: Mostly a lazy day, with a splash of cleaning and a Thai lunch.
We wake to an already warm boat. Previously, the boat remained cool inside till at least mid morning but it’s noticeably getting warmer by the day now. Another reason to take my brain out of relaxed mode and start thinking seriously about a strategic forward plan. The news from the USA regarding opening back up is both worrying (is it too soon?) and yet encouraging. We will need it “open” if we are to go there to haul out and fly back home for summer.
Our day is again low key (more so than normal!). In recent days, Oana has been fighting to get our SailCloudyBay.com website transferred to a new host and today it seems to have finalized. While in the change-over phase we haven’t uploaded any content for fear of it either getting lost or corrupted in the transfer process. As such, no content was jeopardized, but sadly the comments posted by our readers during those days are lost. So Oana’s day today is uploading the backlog of about 12 days worth of blogs and photos. I’ve continued to write them daily because I can barely remember what we did yesterday let alone 12 days ago!
Anyway, apologies to all our avid readers. Make yourself a looong morning coffee or bedtime drink and do some binge reading! Luckily, most daily blogs are short during these days of inactivity on Cloudy Bay.
My main task of the day is deep clean of both bathrooms. Something we do about once per month. It’s amazing how much dirty dust is coming into the boat as we are moored downwind of a town with all the available hatched open to scoop the fresh air inside.
As secondary task, towards sunset I use the dinghy to clean and polish the blue vinyl hull strips. I’m determined to keep them protected from the UV. So far they are really standing up well. If we still had the blue gel-coat stripe it would for sure be a dull matt blue by now. It always surprises me how having that blue strip bright and shining makes the boat “pop” visually.
Early afternoon, our treat for the day is a trip ashore to get another Thai take away. This time, against the lock-down rules, the owner lets us inside the restaurant to take our order and then wait for it in the air conditioning. We don’t resist or complain because it’s baking hot outside. We hope our little bit of business is helping them, but the owner says they are only getting 5-10 takeout orders a day and it almost costs them more to stay open than just completely close down. Especially that most orders are for home delivery. The lady owner explains she wants to remain open under such circumstances so that people don’t assume they are out of business. We assume it must be the same for most of the restaurants that have remained open for take-out / home delivery.
We take our PadThai and Pad See Eew and again walk into the nearby office block courtyard garden to eat it. We find the same table and chairs in exactly the same position we left them 2 weeks ago, but now very dusty. And this time it’s much warmer. Too warm to eat really. So only half of the meal is consumed and we head back to the boat. Despite both of us wearing sun hats, Oana gets a headache from the heat and I’m feeling a bit dizzy.
As soon as we are onboard, back in the breeze under our sunshade, we get instant relief. Then a swim further cools us down. If they ever try to stop us swimming around the boat we are leaving!
In the evening we tackle video editing again. Oana has been continually updating the Cayman videos and she has a new technique for presenting the maintenance projects: using many short clips while she does an explanatory voice-over. I really like what she’s done. Makes it much more viewable. By midnight we also manage to finish the first pass on our 3 days passage from Bahamas to Jamaica. We really are catching up on editing now. Especially that we are taking very little footage while on lock-down these days.
We flop onto bed by 12:30. Even at this time of night the cabin feels almost too warm to sleep. It’s certainly getting hotter!