All Play and No Work?

Just in case you think that all we do is play carnival, hike and sip sundowners on an azure sea, we decided to take a break from that life and spend a day on boat cleaning.  Truth be told, this is probably a more normal day for us, but today was a tad more intense.

What did we get up to today?

Number one reason we came to Carriacou was to be in the clean waters where we could happily get in and scrub Mowzer's bottom.  Yes, she's a dirty girl with slime, moss and barnacles galore.  It's taken us all day and a few sessions but we have scrubbed her right to the bottom of her keels and reduced a whole colony of life.  That colony tried to take up residence on us but fresh water and soap dealt with that, although I might be itching just at the thought of it for a while.  Hopefully we've added a little to Mowzer's speed as well as reduced the ick-factor.

Henry taking a turn, scrubbing away on the green slime at the waterline.

Mollusks, green slime and crabs just as a starter - got to get it all off the bottom and especially the prop. 

That's much better!

Meanwhile, when not in the water, I removed the sunscreens from the front windows, scrubbed them down and washed the windows under them.  After six years of full-on sun the stitching on the screens had pretty much vanished, so I pulled out the machine and repaired them all around.  Let's hope we get another six years out of them, and we can certainly see out the windows with much more clarity.

Front sunscreens all clean and repaired and back in place.  Also, see the nice little shades I made for the front hatches?  Now we can keep our hatches open even when it rains :-)

And finally, what has all the cruisers abuzz?  Talk of Invest 96 which we are all watching as it becomes more organized in the mid-Atlantic and has been named this afternoon as tropical storm Danny.  Today the thought was that if it does reach H status (we don't use that dreaded word), it may be a category 2 and would most likely make landfall in the Dominica/Martinique area next week.  However, the prediction models are pretty disparate at the moment and there are thoughts it could hit anywhere from Grenada to the Virgin Islands.  We'll be heading out of Carriacou to get down to the south shore of Grenada tomorrow and we'll watch it carefully from there.  This is our first "significant feature" so we definitely don't want to get caught out where we shouldn't be.

Grenada is the southernmost island before Trinidad & Tobago and South America - hopefully well south of any nastiness.