Order placed and cleaning

Again the morning was spent hunched over my computer making the last changed to the big order. Ramon, from Jose Santiago’s came around 0930 to make our order, he was prepared to write down everything we wanted, I had typed everything into excel, so after going over it I just printed it our for him. With the order in I felt a lot better. Had lunch of cabbage pancakes and miso soup with rice, then prepped for dinner right afterwards, meatballs, potato gratin and pea, mint, avocado salad. In the afternoon I asked for Brooke to help me clean things, while she cleaned out dry storage and labeled things for where the new cans are going go, I cleaned out the chest freezers and made sure they were on.

I didn’t go outside at all today until after dinner when I want to the grocery store with a handful of people. Robin get here tomorrow, I wonder what he thinks about me being the cook.

Food order

Today was worse than yesterday, huge headache, I just want to unzip my scalp and take out my brain so that I can relax. I never really thought about how difficult it would be to order food for 9 months; it’s everything from salt and pepper to meat and cheese. I’m avoiding ordering to many canned beans and gross vegetables that stick around to long. I made eggs to order and everyone was very please with that, lunch was white bean soup that I even liked and dinner was lots of fresh vegetables. My only fear is that I’m going to run out of ideas for things to make halfway across the Atlantic.

Brooke was organizing her rack and we got to talking about cold weather clothing, looks like I won’t be needing too much of mine now. She doesn’t have foulie boots, so she can borrow mine.

Making breakfast.

Costco

This morning I went over the list of food to order for this coming season; my brain hurts. I’ve never done anything like this before, I don’t know what some of the stuff is and on top of that, some is in Spanish. By the afternoon I had gone over the list of things to order and made a list for Costco, there were a lot of things that the company didn’t have that we got last year from Sysco. After dinner and tours were over one of the tour guides, Mark, was going to Costco and he has a card so John and I went with him. I love Costco, so I had a lot of fun; I picked up a few things to help this week until we get half our order at the end of the week. I got two large pineapples for 6 dollars, really ripe avocados 8 dollars, a giant bag of flour and 7 ½ dozen eggs.

Grant cleaning out medical drawers.

Day off, beach and caves

Most amazing day off in Puerto Rico. Brooke’s dad is visiting so they had a rental car and Richard, Jesse and I joined them. We went south to the dry forest and the beach, we drove down a very curvy road thinking it wouldn’t get us anywhere but then we found an amazing beach. After that we had lunch at a roadside stop, lots of little fried things, shrimp and beef empanadas, mufunngo and I think pork stomach soup.

Then on to the most amazing cave, behind a Texico station, as we pulled in we saw a bunch of people walking down a hill so it was obviously up that way. As we walked up the trail we were joined by a tour guide, a dog, she followed us all the way to the caves and deep into them and all the way back out. It was raining heavily by the time we got to the first cave, we climbed down between some tree roots and a few steps and there was a huge open room of the cave. The second cave was spectacular, climbed deep into a cave, past a some smaller rooms and lots of stalactites and stalagmites. We turned the corner and there was a huge window, a giant opening with an amazing view.

Beach.

Brooke's dad made a shark.

Goat.

Empinadas, fried pork, plantains, pork stomach soup.

Ruines of a house.

Path to the caves.

Brooke is excited.

Richard.

Back in the galley

I’m very happy to be back in the galley. Nick did breakfast this morning and that was his last meal, I guess he just wasn’t all that happy here and things between him and the management were not great. So no more work party for me for now, I went to the galley and started cleaning, did that for about two hours then sat down and decided what to make for lunch and dinner. Ended up doing veggie burritos with re-fried beans, rice, peppers and taco fixings and for dinner spaghetti and meatballs with bread.

It was kind of amazing all the things that I found leftover from last season, the best, ginger beer that Dina had made.

Tenley.

Grant, Sam and Ryan.

Brooke, Jesse and Richard.

Slow work

Ryan arrived last night, it’s great to see him again and glad that he’ll be crossing the Atlantic with us. I didn’t really have any good jobs this morning, I was helping the bilge team clean the tank room with pressurized water, my job was to stop the leaking from the hose connection to the machine. Then Caleb came around and tightened it with his man hands and my job disappeared. I was then told to stand by and make sure backstays didn’t catch on anything as the mast went up, but then that was halted because the head rig is in bad shape and things had to happen there first. So I stood around for awhile playing deck monkey and helped Sam paint some bolts, then more standing around.

Laura grabbed me and we went back into the tank room to install the mini bilge baffles that have been in production for the past few days. The idea is to slide a piece of plastic into a slot and have water flow in but not out. The pieces holding the baffle in place have to be screwed in to the hull, a very awkward place, none of it went well and we were just stripping screws, luckily it was lunch time so we got to quit early.

After lunch there was a lot more standing around and helping those aloft to put up the fore topgallant mast, but that didn’t go well either. There was a lot of up and down, but it didn’t go all the way up today.

Grant working in the tank room.

Engine room mess

I was confined to the engine room today, no sun for me. Sam, Tenely and I cleaned out the forward tank room and then Caleb and Don sorted things out and threw out a lot of trash. I then spent a good while vacuuming the engine room and then painting, while I was doing that everyone else was putting up the fore topgallant mast.

The forward tank room in the galley.