Well, you may have noticed that we don’t post much stuff on our blog lately but really there is not much to say. For the past month we’ve been intensively working on Chocobo to make her a beauty while the boat was on the ground. So here she is back in the water after sanding the old paint on the bottom hulls and applying one coat of primer and two coats of antifouling paint to prevent all the living organisms in the ocean from transforming our hulls into a moving reef. We also cleaned thoroughly the hulls over the water line and applied 6 coats of Poli-Glow a liquid polymer that protects the fiberglass against the sun and the water and makes the surface look shinny as if it’s been waxed. Just these two things may not seem a lot of work but trust me you wouldn’t believe how much surface a catamaran has. At one point I had the feeling of painting the exterior of my house with a tooth brush and with an average temperature of 45°C (113°F) during the day when considering the humidity factor we would drink and sweat up to 4 liters (1 gallon) of water per day! We went through 5 bottles of Poli-Glow, 1 gallon of primer paint and 4 gallons of Micron-66 antifouling paint. This last one cost $359.00 per gallon; ouch!!! But cleaning and shining the boat is not all we did. We also got a brand new jib sail (that’s the front sail covered with the yellow cover) since the old one started to rip itself apart probably in despair and to finish it once and for all with the unbearable heat of the south Caribbean. Danielle also resupplied the boat with food as we almost ate everything before we left for Peru, burp! She managed to buy for over $1600.00 worth of grocery going back and forth every day to the supermarket and the most extraordinary thing is that she also managed to fit all this on the boat. Well, who has never dreamed of sleeping next to a box of Corn Flakes after all? No, I’m just kidding we didn’t have to put food baskets in our bed to fit it all in but we’ve heard of sailors who actually did that as they couldn’t fit all their stuff in the storage areas of the boat. By the way, a storage area on a boat is basically any hole you can find that would fit the item you desperately need to store hence transforming the whole boat into a giant cabinet with stuff all over it. If you are lucky the items of the same kind will be grouped together in the same place but this is often not the case. This is why you can find our navigation binocular and our wine glasses in the same basket or the flour pales sitting beside the paint and spare parts bins!But now that the boat is all set and we got food for the next 4 months we are ready to go sailing again. The hurricane season in the Caribbean is over and we will now head west first to the Island of Aruba for a quick stop and then to the San Blas archipelago on the North coast of Panama. But for this we are a bit nervous since the trip from Aruba to Porvenir in the San Blas will take us 4 days and 4 nights at sea making this trip the longest in our trip so far.
