Okay, so today Randal and I were talking and I realized my biggest fear about our passage to India and then up through the Red Sea is that I’ll miss Spring Training and most of the baseball season until we get to the Mediterranean in May. Yipes! We’ll be able to send and receive short email messages from our web page manager and to keep our business manager Helen posted through our single side band radio sail mail, but we won’t have Internet access other than Internet Cafes along the way. Our cell phone connection for the computer needs a SIM card for each country we visit. We won’t be anywhere long enough through the Red Sea to make it feasible to get a SIM card, actually for our regular cell phones either. We can talk with other boats along the way with our VHF radio so we will have communications, just not with most of you very often. When we finally do have Internet Access I’ll send an overload of stuff to you. Sorry.
Our actual passage from here to Cochin (Kochi) India isn’t totally decided upon nor are our stops in the Red Sea. But we will go up the west side of the Red Sea probably stopping in Eritrea (which I had never heard of till now,) maybe the Sudan and hopefully Egypt where I definitely want to see the new Library of Alexandria. For weather related reasons you’re supposed to be out of the Red Sea by the end of May.
We’ll go through the Suez Canal and then aim for Ashkelon on the coast of Israel, about 40 miles south of Tel Aviv.
Red Sea map from the Red Sea Pilot
Our almost complete flag collection.
We still need a flag for Sudan and I’ll also get Cyprus and Greece though it will be a while before we might need those flags. The yellow flag is our quarantine flag which is flown when you enter a new country. The green flag with the seahorse is another Seahorse Marine pennant we use on the bow to show where the wind is blowing. We have a new American flag ready to replace the worn out one we have now. I’ll have to bring it home to dispose of it. Can’t burn it on a diesel fuel boat and there’s no good place to bury it. And, straight from an overpriced sports shop in Hyannis, we have the all essential Red Sox flag to be flown throughout baseball season.
Yesterday was another trip to town. We dropped off our scuba tanks to be filled and retrieved some stainless steel poles Randal had ordered. They will replace the PVC ones we use now to hold up the side awnings. Randal is finishing installing them as I type. Last night we had dinner on Pelikaan, the boat of our friends Hans and Fien. The main course was crepes made in their brand new, bought that morning, frying pan. They were wonderful ; filled with your choice of cheese, avocado or mango. I mixed mango and avocado with some mango chutney and it was great.
Today we’re back to chores. Tomorrow DoraMac will be lifted from the water and put on a hard stand so the bottom can be repainted with anti-fouling paint. We hope it won’t take a week, but that will depend on the weather and how quickly the painters work. Randal will stand over them with a carrot and stick.
No real cooking on the hard because everything has to be carried off the boat to be washed. I’m going to quit typing and make some salmon patties for dinner tonight and meals on the hard. Just rewarm them in the microwave and eat from a paper plate. No mess.
Ru
DoraMac