Testigo Grande,
Los Testigos,
Venezuela
11.22.917N
63.08.123W

First thing this morning, Dale collected Scott and Gerry and headed to the GuardiaCoasta station on the little island further down from where we are anchored to ‘check in’. Dale reports that the young officers were very polite and spoke English. He had taken his various cheat sheets, books and English to Spanish dictionary with him to help in the communication process and was much relieved when it wasn’t necessary. Although, the station does not clear you in for customs purposes, it is suggested that you let them know that you are transiting the area.

I can’t say that we did anything of interest today. We were entertained with the frigate birds diving for fish and saw a couple of small turtles between the two boats.

Gerry came over and the guys went over the charts that we have. The paper ones that we purchased in Trinidad, we aren’t going to be using after all, so we gave them to him and he had some software charts that provided greater detail than the ones we have of the Caribbean islands we just passed through. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to upload the software charts and ended up getting an error that can only be fixed by connecting to the internet. I suspect that we’ve violated some copyright code that recognizes which computer it was originally loaded onto. Oh well, we’ve managed to survive so far.

We cleaned the Palace and made a rib roast on the barbeque. The last time we had done this, we ended up cooking the roast to a cinder; Gerry & Nicky were our guests that evening as well. As I recall, they were good sports about it and picked around the extra crispy bits to find something edible. This time, Dale was jumping up every 15 minutes to check on it. Good thing too. Our little canister of fuel had emptied and he caught it before the temperature dropped too far. Still, we managed to cook it too long for the medium rare middle I was going for.

Our scare for the night came after I had gone to bed but Dale was still up reading. I awoke to what sounded like something hitting our boat. It was definitely loud. Dale jumped up and went topside with a flashlight and I grabbed our big megawatt spotlight. We searched every inch of the boat, the mast, the boom, the hardtop and the water surrounding us looking for what could have made the noise. When nothing could be found, Dale told me to start looking inside the boat; maybe something had fallen. I checked the forward cabin and head and found nothing. Nothing appeared to be out of place in the main salon area, so I started looking around the back cabin.

We started to analyze what each of us had heard and the direction that we thought it had come from and suddenly Dale found it; with his foot. One of the water glasses we hang from a stemware caddy on the overhead, had fallen. I had made little quilted koozies for each one to keep them from hitting each other while underway and bungee cords around the stems to keep them in place. The bungee cords had been removed at dinnertime and it had fallen straight down, landing on a rug but breaking the stem. They are rather substantial glasses so I guess that was the reason for the loud thud we heard but I’m still amazed that Dale didn’t realize the noise came from directly in front of where he was sitting. At least it wasn’t the radar reflector crashing down; that one gave us a startle too!