The conversation of cruisers deals almost exclusively with what’s gone wrong with the boat, what catastrophes one has faced, how one has dealt with…stuff.
It naturally arose that we were having difficulties with the cleanliness of our fuel and that what we really needed was a pump to let us remove the fuel from one tank and filter it into another. Bill said he had a pump he didn’t want and would be happy to sell.
On Saturday morning, we hopped into Boffo to head over to Unchained to examine the pump. WW taught me to drive. I am now a dinghy-enabled not-yet-last-mate. My training continues.
On Unchained, it was immediately clear that a pump managing six gallons a minute would overload a paper towel-lined fuel-polishing funnel in seconds and leave our decks awash in diesel. WW declined the purchase. That dealt with, Sue took me below to show me their home while WW and Bill stayed on deck exchanging war stories.
Unchained is a monohull of 40-something feet. Her chief drawback is a lack of storage, but Sue had done a great job in overcoming this as much as possible. Below decks, the boat is cozy. Sue and Bill, in their 60s, sold everything and bought her for their retirement. They set out, with very little experience, from Tennesee, and are making their way to
Tern on a stick! Off Boqueron
After our visit, we headed in to shore, trying to raise Raul on the radio. We found Irene on the dock with a mountain of clean laundry, swearing at Ray in her glorious Lancastrian for having abandoned her. WW gave her a ride out to C Drifters while I stayed and watched the terns acting like weather vanes on a cluster of big poles near the dinghy dock. WW had Ray call Raul and he arranged to meet us a bit later to take us to a supermarket for provisions. We headed off to the local Internet café. WW booked our flights to
Raul was a great source of information. He pointed at the fields as he drove and said that they all used to be covered in sugar cane. Now, virtually no cane is grown on PR because no one wants to cut it. It’s hard, dangerous, manual labour. He said machines were introduced at the very end of production, but apparently too late to save the industry. I said that must be hard on the rum producers and he said the sugar is all imported now. When we said we’d seen lots of sugar in the DR, he said, “Sure. You know who cuts it? The Haitians. They are brought in for the harvest, then shipped out again.”
We did a big provisioning run, then met Raul outside. He was playing some wonderful music which he said was Johnny Albino. He said it was old dance music. “Us old guys [he must be 50] like romantic stuff like that,” he said. He told us how his grandfather used to run a dance hall and how he’d danced there to this music as a youth. I asked him what CDs we should get for the best of PR music. “Johnny Albino,” he said, “and Hector Lavoe for salsa.” Then he played us some Hector Lavoe which shut us all up till we were back at Boquéron.
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