June 06-30, 2002 -- Quick Month

June 6-30, 2002 -- Quick Month From June 6 through June 8, we didn't do a whole lot. We headed out to the Centro Commercial in Los Robles twice to pick up some stuff for the computer, and otherwise didn't do a whole lot. On June 9, we headed over to Gary and Josefina's for the day. Josefina had been after us for some time to come out to the house for an afternoon. She is a wonderful cook! Whenever we have dinner there, she always tries to fix a traditional Venezuelan or Dominican meal. On June 10, it was back to work though! While I took care of some things in town, Mike took Fido's "clothes" off so they could be repaired. The dinghy cover came to be known as clothes because I don't know how to say dinghy cover in Spanish! So, when I was talking with Johnny about the cover, I referred to it as the dinghy's clothes. After a second, Johnny knew what I was talking about, and they have been the dinghy's clothes ever since! By the time I returned to the boat, Mike was ready to deploy our stern anchor and launch a now naked Fido. After that, we ran Fido's clothes up to Johnny so he could repair them. On June 11, I was back in town again. This time I was showing Dan and Jan from Sojourner around. We hit all of the important places: the boat supply store in town, travel agency, grocery store, pharmacy, and Tiva sandal shop. It was a fun outing with lots of walking. After I got back, we were invited to go to dinner with Galadriel and Blind Date at a Chinese restaurant. Now, you have to keep in mind, Mike and I aren't crazy about Chinese food to begin with. However, we agreed to go because we had been told that the food was good even though the service was horrible. So, forewarned is forearmed, right? Wrong! As predicted, the service was horrible. Being the only diners in the place you would think that you would not need to send up a flare to get their attention. However, when the orders came out, they were also wrong! There wasn't a single dish that we ordered! If it weren't for the company, it would have been the worst meal we have had in Margarita. On June 12, we tackled our head problem. There was a definite blockage in the line running to the head pump. We tried to burn it out using Muratic Acid, but that didn't work out. So, we took a hammer to the PVC line to try to break the scaling loose. This helped significantly. Unfortunately, everything then piled up in the elbow! So, I took the line apart and sure enough there was 15 years of scale build up. Once we cleaned that out, the pump worked fine again. After a day of working on the head pump, there was no way I was cooking, so Mike took me out to dinner at Bambu where Galadriel and Blind Date joined us for dinner. After returning to the boat, we ran muratic acid through the head lines again, just to be sure. Between June 13 and June 15, it was business as usual. We did a little work on the boat, we had fun with friends, and enjoyed a nice dinner aboard Nightwinds with Dan and Jan from Sojourner. We were resting up for the next job. On June 17 and 18, we tackled the replacement of the bad heat exchanger on Ling Ling, our Fisher Panda generator. It took two days to complete because the heat exchanger is located below the engine next to the sound shield. So, in order to change the heat exchanger, you have to un-mount the engine, then jack it up. We spent the rest of the month doing small things aboard the boat.