April 17-23, 2001 -- Ponce

To kick things off with a bang, the first thing Mike and I did was to rent a car. Since today was Sandra's last day with us, she took advantage of the free tour trolleys to tour Ponce with Sue from Kokopelli. This left us time to do all kinds of running around to reprovision. On April 18, Dan and Jan from Sojourner joined us to take Sandra to the airport. After we dropped her off, we headed to West Marine in Fajardo, then on to Sam's Club on our way back to Ponce. When we got back to the boat, we discovered that one of the items we purchased was not what we expected, so we would need to head back to Fajardo to return it. On April 19, we headed back to Fajardo to return the item and to pick up a few things that we added to our marine list. After we, again, hit Sam's Club, we stopped by a pay phone to find out if a package we were expecting finally showed up in Boqueron. It was there so we headed to Boqueron to pick it up. We missed the Post Office closing by 12 minutes. Fortunately, we caught one of the USPS employees as he was leaving. He graciously went back inside to retrieve our package! To give you an idea of what we did today, Ponce is in the middle of the southern coast of PR. Fajardo is on the north east tip of PR. Boqueron is in the middle of the west coast of PR. Yup, we traversed the island from one side to the other, and then some! However, happily, we had completed all of our 'out of town' running that we needed to do and could focus on staying in Ponce. Finally, Shaefer and Brown delivered our new inverter and the VHF radio we had them look at the Ponce Yacht Club office. Unfortunately, we arrived to late to pick it up. On April 20, we headed out to Santiago's Cash and Carry. This place is similar to other warehouse stores, except you do not need to be a member to buy stuff there. We loaded up on frozen chicken and a few other things before heading back to the boat. After getting the frozen stuff stowed away, we picked up the inverter and radio from the office. We spent most of the rest of the day putting stuff away. In the afternoon, we worked on Orca's computer problem, and Howard from Serendipity came over to see if he could help us with our SSB and autopilot problems. On April 21, we did more provisioning. On April 22, I headed out to Walgreens to drop Mike's prescriptions off, and to look for a few things that we thought we might be able to get there. When I got back, Mike had the new inverter mostly wired up. He finished it, and we tested it. The new inverter does not invert! It has a bad transfer switch! In the afternoon, I headed over to Serendipity to help them with a printing problem they were having. I needed a piece of software, so I called Mike on the radio and headed for the grocery store to get sour cream and milk and dinner for us. Mike completed the install on Serendipity's computer and I met him back at the boat. After dinner, we headed back to Serendipity for cocktails with them as well as Fourth Day and Contrail. On April 23, we returned the car and then finished putting the last of everything away. We made sure the boat was ready to get underway again since we planned to leave. We called Heart Interface about the bad replacement inverter, and they said that they could have a new one shipped out to us on Wednesday. This fit well with our plans since we could then move to Salinas to get everything there. We gave them the shipping information and made plans to leave the dock on April 24.