A Tale of Two Chemists: Tighter Than a Frog’s Arse

Tighter Than a Frog’s Arse

Tuesday 26th - Wednesday 27th January

This blog post will be mercifully short and sweet. It’s not been a particularly exciting couple of days, unless you have a special passion for boat cleaning! We have been getting ready for our forthcoming trip back to Sudbury and working through a list of jobs so the boat is in good shape when we leave and ready to roll as soon as possible after we get back.

One job on the list was to contact a diver to clean the bottom of the boat, check our zincs (sacrificial anodes) and replace as necessary. Wayne Emard had been recommended to us by Jolly Harbor marina and we worked with him on our previous stay at the marina back in December. Once we got settled on the dock we gave him a call and he showed up about ten minutes later to discuss what we need doing. The man is a character! He is known as “Red-Trini” to his mates (“Trini” because he comes from Trinidad, “Red” because … I have no idea … he seemed to think it was obvious!). He went into great detail about how everyone has nick-names around here. He told us Americans used to be called “Yanks”, but that is now viewed as disrespectful, so they are called “Money”. He said they may not all be wealthy, but that’s the perception. I asked him “What about Brits …what’s their nickname?” They are known as “Titus”, he replied. “Is that some connection to the empire”, I asked, thinking Antigua is a former British colony, maybe some connection to a Roman emperor ... No … it’s because they are “tight arsed and stingy …. tighter than a frog’s arse”. “Obviously not all of them”, he qualified! As well as fulfilling our diving needs, Wayne is also going to taxi us to the airport. He noted that in order to be successful he is willing to pick up any business … except selling drugs, or doing divorces! In the past he had been convinced he could do a better job than the prime minister, but rather than take on that job, a friend encouraged him to give up drinking. As you can tell, it was a wide ranging and entertaining conversation.

The marina has WiFi, and it’s actually pretty good. For the first time in six months, we were almost able to watch a film last night. It started out well enough, then, when we were half way through, it abruptly stopped. Attempting to reconnect to the Marina WiFi we were told that our ticket had expired. Aggghh. I thought it might be due to excessive data use, but it turned out that it was a timing issue, due to a misunderstanding with the marina on how long we were staying (1-day versus 3-weeks?!) It was actually quite fortunate this happened because on clarifying the situation it transpires that we need a signed declaration from the marina of our docking contract, which I then had to take along to customs and immigration to be stamped, before we could leave the country.

Anyway, we plan to eat butter chicken and naan bread for dinner tonight and watch the rest of the movie. We will sign off from our blog for two weeks and start again once we return to the boat on the 11th April.

Thanks for reading and being part of our adventure

Mike

C-Dock at Jolly Harbor Marina. Cotinga is on the right, and the boat that was right next to us pulled out this afternoon, providing a much clearer view!