Staying busy in Ali Tupu

It sure has been a busy few days here in Ali Tupu. School is out right now for summer break and will resume again in March. Until then the children don't have too much to do so we've been the source of their entertainment all day long. At one point we had 17 dugouts hanging out around Bruadair with people mostly just watching, some coming along side to visit and quite a few asking us to charge their cell phones. Fortunately four other boats pulled in yesterday and they have since become the focus of attention allowing us to get some rest between visitors.

Since being here we got the bottom of the boat cleaned, all of the stainless steel polished, fixed the halyard on the jib and some other small and quick projects done. There hasn't been a shortage of fresh seafood here with lots of crab, lobster and fish being offered for sale shortly after they're caught. For fish we've been buying snappers, jacks and tuna at a dollar a piece and crab and lobster for a little more. Yesterday we had Jan and David over for dinner and enjoyed an excellent crab casserole with green beans and guacamole dip with fresh veggies (no chips!). Yesterday morning just as David was finishing boiling water for coffee we ran out of propane. Propane is our only means of cooking and without it we would be up a creek. So I took off after having a couple cups of coffee to the island of Ali Tupu where I had seen propane tanks the day before but unfortunately they were all empty, no propane there. So I took off in the dingy and motored down the island chain and was finally able to locate a propane tank on the island of Tuwala. The Panamanian propane bottles have a different type of valve than American tanks so it's not as simple as hooking up a new tank here and being done. Instead David from Winterlude came over with his home made adapter that would allow us to gravity feed from the Panamanian tank to our US tanks. It's quite the process. We had to tie ropes around the Panamanian tank and hoist it upside down a few feet off deck. With our US tank on deck and David's adapter/hose hooked up we were able to use gravity to transfer propane from one tank to another. It actually worked out pretty good and took 30 minutes to fill each of our two tanks though without high pressure on the raised tank we can't fill our tanks completely full. And the nice thing is, being this was the first time for either David or myself doing this, we didnt' blow the boat up.

Today we have strong winds out of the north, 100 percent cloud coverage and periodic rains. Sounds like a good day for being lazy and and reading.