San Antonio, Texas

A long way from the sea, but we made it OK. Trinda's brother John picked us up right on time even though the plane was 15 minutes early.

It looks to be a big event family reunion, almost 50 people so far! I didn't realize she had that many relatives!

Yesterday, I found the new owners of the company who made our dinghy. They are going to replace it again! And pay shipping to the Marshals!!! Ya hooo! He said that there was a known problem with the glue in the 2006 models and couldn't believe the previous company owner replaced my bad 2006 with another 2006 with the same bad glue problem. He was extremely nice and helpful! Way to go AMI (Advanced Marine Inflatables)

Photos uploaded

I finally got last year's photos uploaded to my site. 5 months of 2008 and some of 2009.
You can see them at http://www.tcls.com/~larryl/log_katielee/photos/
This is a sample. It was raining during the race that Trinda and I went on a friend's boat, Hawkeye. So she is a little damp!.

We are enjoying the grand kids. We stayed with Guy and Amanda (Zoe and Morgan) for almost 2 weeks and now with Wyndi and Steve (Izzy). Off to San Antonio for Trinda's fmily reunion tomorrow morning.

Surprise, surprise! my brother Donnie and our oldest son Gary are planning to show up too! It should be fun.

Seattle and Grandkids

A little slow to update these days. Been busy here.

First, the news. Our daughter-in-law Amanda unexpectedly went into the hospital the day after we arrived. She is out and doing OK, but assighed to bed rest until the baby comes. Trinda is helping Amanda with the kids and keep up with the household chores. Lots of laundry with 6 and 8 year old girls!

I was plying with Zoe, and did face-plant down a flight of stairs. I have a stiff neck and a unique rug-burn allover my forehead. Too old to be rolling down the stairs!

We are trying to find the things we need to take back to the boat, but are making slow progress. We found a simple sewing machine that Trinda wants for dress making. I have been looking into a different way to manage the DVD collection. I may get a small computer just for the movies and copy them all to hard disks.

I still haven't decided what to do about the laptop or the dinghy.

Seattle Arrival

I think we safely arrived in Seattle. No food on the plane and no SLEEP!!! I just can't sleep sitting up.

The agriculture dept of Hawaii confiscated our sandwiches on arrival. Can't have American lunch meat "If it has left the country"! The real flight times were 5 hours in the air to Hawaii and 6 1/3 hours to Seattle. by my watch, we left at 12:30 PM and we arrived at 2 AM

Christmas Dinner Photo

New Years and Yokwe Race

We went to the New Years eve "block party". It seemed like most of Majuro came! We had a beer or two and walked up and down the street a few times. It was only about 3 blocks long, took maybe an hour. Then we sat around on the curb and visited with the other cruisers. We gave up early and went back to the boat about 10:30.

At midnight they started firing off flairs and a few bottle rockets. I guess there were no fireworks available here. One flair, A red parachute type came drifting down really close to the boat. It missed though, by about 20 feet. Gave me just a little pitter-patter in the old thumper. A flair could burn right through the awning and maybe even the deck!

Yesterday the yacht club held their monthly race. We didn't feel like racing "our house", so we volunteered as crew on Hawkeye. We had met John and Linda in Mexico in 2001 and they are on the mooring ball next to us. We had a nice day. John's boat is fast for a smaller boat (38 foot) and he came in second before the handicaps were applied. Then he moved back to 5th. The prizes for the race are donated by the businesses here. Best is a barrel of diesel (about $150) next was a night in the resort and
various T-shirts and caps. They gave 'crew prizes' too. Trinda won 2 tickets to the movie theater! She thought it was the best one!

Today I went to the restaurant to use the WiFi and order our airplane tickets to visit the rest of the family when we get back to the States. It was slow! It took over 4 hours to find the flights and pay for them! We are going to San Antonio for 10 days, the Ranch for a week and stopping in Chicago a few days on the way back to Seattle.

I can't believe the hours I have signed up to be on a plane! 21 hours from here to Seattle, (2 1/2 days back!) plus the 4 flights there.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

There are lots of boats here in Majuro. I think there were about 30 boats for Christmas dinner at the Tide Table restaurant. We had a pot luck out back on their back porch. It is a hotel too, so it was really in a meeting room/patio sort of thing. The local yacht club sprung for two turkeys and a ham. Then we brought the rest. I made stuffing and Trinda made 2 chocolate cakes. It all went purty good. I ate so much I got sick again, just like Thanksgiving! Ha!

We played the gift giving game. Everyone brought one gift. We drew numbers to see what order to select and open them. After Trinda got to go first, all the rest of us had the option to steel someone else's gift or select a new one to unwrap. Trinda had hers stole twice and me once. When it is stolen, you can either steel again or open. I had a nice LED flash light for a few minutes. I ended up with a squid jig. Trinda got a collection of perfumes.

We moved from anchor to a buoy. There are good newer buoys for $3/day and questionable ones for $1 to $2. We are planning to fly to Seattle and Texas for a few weeks so we took one of the good buoys. It is in 115 feet of water. The deepest buoy I seen! The anchorage was only about 50 feet with good sand holding. I had a little trouble getting the anchor up, but it was just white sand drifting off it when it came up.

The weather here is fine. We get a light sprinkle almost ever day, but so far not enough to fill the tanks. The trade winds seem to blow 15 to 20 most of the time, but the town is in the east end of the lagoon, so there is no fetch. It is nice here. The club got together and put in half a dozen buoys at two other motus in the lagoon, both less than a couple hours away. Several boats went out to them for the time between Christmas and New Years.

There is a big 'block party' scheduled for New Years Eve. They block off the main street and have several live bands in addition to the usual stuff. We are looking forward to it.

There is WiFi available in the anchorage, but it is quite expensive so far. We can carry the computer up to the restaurant and if we buy something its free WiFi. It is a pain to do so. If I don't get the photos uploaded, I'll take them to Seattle and do it there. Looking back through them, I see that I didn't do so well as a photographer!