Quarantine over

Monday 28th September.
We have a walk along the Malecon.

Tuesday: Nothing.
Wednesday: Bike to shop and beach.
Thursday: much like Tuesday except I make a joke based on the ‘Things, that in 2019, you would never have thought you might say in 2020’.
“Two bubbles walk into a pub and scan themselves in”

Friday:
Covid freedom day, It’s been 14 days since Kathy left Liverpool, and we have decided today that we are probably safe enough to go out for a meal. The temperature readings and oxygen levels are good, although it would appear the finger on my right hand might have Covid, often reading just 85%, the left hand is fine though, usually getting 98/99%.
We go to the Vegan taco restaurant and Kathy enjoys her first ‘meal out’ here since January.

Saturday:
Finally we get to the farmers market just off the Malecon, I feel for the stall holders there, there’s next to no customers. Then again, a lot of them sell artisan stuff, so they could well still be living off the profit on an artisan spud they sold in January. I’m mainly there for the Vegan Pesto, Arturo is coming over on Sunday to meet Kathy and we plan to do Pasta & Pesto for him with some of the real Parmesan cheese kathy brought back from Milan (Thanks again Bobbie), however she said she wouldn’t have any pesto until Tuesday.
Later in the day we cycle to Chedraui Palacio, a bigger version of the local Chedraui Abasolo. At least they have Cilantro, which seems to be in short supply here. It’s a lovely bike ride, especially on the way home as the sun sets and a cool breeze accompanies us on the 15 minute downhill cycle back to the boat.

I have setup a server in the Amazon cloud (AWS LightSail), and I’m spending a bit of time playing with this, it’s good fun, well mostly, and a side effect is that I can connect to the BBC iPlayer and we can watch our favorite programs now. I’m amazed how cheap this is, I wanted to do this a while back, but it was going to cost me around $50 / month, now it’s only $3.50/month with discounts and a free month. If this works out I’m going to move all my websites and this blog over to Amazon.

I have been struggling with the loud bangs/cracks I have been hearing in the boat since I arrived in the marina a while back. My first thought was that the mooring lines were two tight and creaking on the hawse, Something that happens when the lines are very tight, but this wasn’t the case. Sometimes the bangs are quite loud and I had wondered if debris was floating under the boat and bashing into it. Then I noticed after a few weeks that it seemed to be loudest around sunrise and sunset. I worried that the boat was expanding and contracting with the crazy heat and that perhaps parts of the hull expanded faster than other parts and that caused the cracking sounds. I was worrying that it might be damaging the boat, and today I could hear constant cracking and banging around the head area. Normally when I run outside I can’t see anything in the water and the lines are slack, but today underneath the head area I saw a large group of big fish taking turns to attack the hull, and as they did I could hear the cracking sound. I’m still not sure if it’s their teeth hitting the hull, or the crack of the barnacles being ripped off, but at least that mystery is finally solved.
The antifoul I have on, which is a Jotun Seaforce from Malaysia does not seem to be holding up anymore. I have provisionally booked a haul out for the middle of November in Puerto Escondido and will have some of the locally proven paint applied.

Sunday:
Arturo calls over in the afternoon and we take a trip to the Mogote for a swim, Later we have dinner on the boat and Kathy gets to know Arturo better.

Hopefully now we are out of our quarantine period we can do some more interesting things around town.

Paul Collister.