It was good to find Mobetah bobbing happily in her slip at Monkey Bay Marina. Not many changes noted except the caretaker's children have really grown since we left. Abby (6) and Bertilda (4) head off to school every morning in the launcha, often accompanied by mom and brother, Thomas (2). Alan, at almost 14, leaves way early in the morning for his job in town selling shrimp, and then he attends a private school in the afternoon, not arriving back home until almost 7 P.M.
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| Off to school |
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| Alan in school uniform with Spice, the marina dog |
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| Abby, Thomas, and Bertilda love to pose for pictures |
We got back into the marina life of boat work, happy hour, pot lucks, trips to town for shopping and trying various restaurants. The only boaters left at Monkey Bay besides us and Angelina were Art and Renie on Jewell and Vonnie and Ray on Wishbone. Ralph and Cheryl came for a week to check on their boat, Fortuitous, before they left for Chile for a year, where Ralph will be working.
The weather made boat work difficult. It has been one of the rainiest years in Guatemala in ten years. There were days of unending downpours. Our caretaker, Efrain, has had to work hard at keeping the "green" from taking over the boats and marina. It took us almost three weeks to get four coats of varnish on the exterior brightwork, since there weren't many sunny days. Finally, by mid-February, we were ready to have the boat hauled for what we anticipated to be a 4 or 5 day "bottom job." We have always done our own bottom painting, but in doing so, we just kept adding layer upon layer of bottom paint, so we decided with the inexpensive labor prices here, we would have them remove all the old paint. It was kind of fun to watch three or four men scraping and sanding the bottom of our boat. It was slower than we had hoped, but finally, after a week, they put on the first coat of bottom paint. We expected the second coat the next day and then getting back in the water. Unfortunately, the day before this should have happened, the one-and-only travel lift operator got mad at the boss and quit, so there was no one to put our boat back in the water. They had to wait a week for someone from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, where they build Travel Lifts, to come down to train more operators! Thus, it was the end of February before Mobetah was back in the water.
We were fortunate to have our marina owner offer to let us sleep in his vacation house while the boat was in the yard. We did all our cooking out in the cruisers' kitchen and spent much time in the cruisers' palapa, when not at the boat yard. By the time we finally got back on the boat, we had stuff scattered all over the marina. Now it is time to finish getting the boat ready for cruising.
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| Karl (The Marina Owner's) Vacation Home |
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| Interior of Karl's Vacation Home |
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| Bill at the Kitchen Bar |
