Homeless By Choice

Chris and I went to Odin and hooked up the stereo and cleaned her in preparation for a cruise today with 28 Panamanians, paying $50 apiece to motor to Starfish Beach, eat some smoked chicken and baked potatoes and swim in the calm water.

After returning to town I purchased groceries for dinner.  “Where are you going, Jim?”   “Home, to make some dinner.”  “We have some chicken on the boat, three people cancelled.”  “I just bought fish taco fixings.”

Three people cancelled.   I looked at Jen, sitting at a table with her friend.   “Jim, why don’t you invite them along for tomorrow?”  Good plan.

I sat down with these two pretty young things.  “Today is your lucky day, some people cancelled on a sailing tour tomorrow and you two can come along for a free day on the water.”   Jen introduced me to her friend Melissa.  “Melissa, this is Jim, the guy I was telling you about.”

Jen declined, saying that they had Spanish class.  I looked at Mel, “First rule of travel, accept the unexpected and don’t turn down any adventures thrown in your face.”   Three minutes later I was sure that I had convinced Mel, but Jen was a bit of a harder sell.  “Jen aren’t you going sailing with Mel and me?”   “OK, but you convinced me, not Melissa.”  “Fine, if you enjoy yourself, credit Mel, if not, blame me.”

We chatted for an hour.  These girls were pretty cool.  Mel is working on her PhD in economics, Jen has four bachelors degrees, Economics, International Business, Business Management and French.  She also paid her full way through school, working 60 hours a week.   She lives in New Mexico and has never owned a car.  She walks forty five minutes to get her groceries and carries them back.   Her lithe hard body reflects her daily activities.   Flexible?  She did splits, bent over and put her palms flat on the dock with legs straight.  She had a six pack.   Twenty two countries in the last six years.  One got her shit together 24 year old.  Born in Belgium with and American mother she has two passports.

Mel, 22 has completed her masters in Economics and is going to get her PhD after this years travels and is half Thai.

Chris yelled out, “C’mon, Jim, we have some chicken on the boat.”  Twenty eight pieces had been smoked for the tour.  “I just bought a pound of linguado and the fixings.”  “Girls, let’s get in this tiny boat and head out to the anchorage and make some linguado tacos.”  “What’s that?” “A white fish.”

Good thing, Mel is a pescadorian.   Five extremely well built, tall, good looking guys watched the two young women board my tiny boat, no doubt wondering why they hadn’t asked ask for the company of these two.  Maybe they had.

We pulled up and boarded the 60 foot trawler.  Dirty dishes everywhere, the usual state of affairs.    Sure.  Chris put the smoked chicken in the oven and we headed to the foredeck, cracked the windows and escaped the humid, hot, smoky salon.  “Jen, time to cook, you want to help?”

I dipped the fish in eggs, breaded them and sauteed them while Jen sliced up some veggies.   Chris and Mel headed to the upper deck.   A short while later we joined them, with eight hot fish tacos.   We just sat under the stars as I pointed out the constellations.  Mel exclaimed, “I want to live on a boat.”   After a couple of hours I took them back and told them to meet me on the dock at 10:30.  “We’ll be there, thanks, that was fun.”

On Saturday I hitched a ride with another friend to check out the boat.  It is a very lightweight fifteen footer.  A substantial 12 footer, much more heavily constructed and with substantially more freeboard, can be had for $1,600 new.   A new 15 horsepower four stroke can be purchased for about $1,400.  On Sunday my friend brought the boat to town and I took him back home and went back home with it.   On Monday, I ran into a guy from New Jersey that I met on the street a couple of weeks ago, asking about where to buy an inexpensive boat.   If you just want to tool around in the bay, a little boat with a little outboard is good for most months and being economical to operate and maintain affords maximum cruising for minimal dollars.

We headed out to the finca in Dolphin Bay, where I encountered a former worker, sleeping in the restaurant with his uncle, dead drunk as he has been every time I have seen him in the last week.   Last Friday a friend of mine found him floating in the bay, passed out in his boat.   Yup, sure enough, a gas generator had been taken from the property. A former worker, by all accounts hard working and honest had taken it and reported doing so to the corregidor.   He has been trying to collect $900 in wages for over a year from the property owner.  Can’t say that I blame the guy.   The pool is leaking.  This is going to be a big issue.

We continued down to my property in Aguacate and dropped by to collect a long overdue debt in Loma Partida.   Not much success collecting there.  Back to town before running out of daylight.   I pulled into Casa Verde to find a red light flashing on the outboard.   WTF?  I checked the oil.   It was seriously low and filthy, with bits of metal in it.   Damn.   I pulled the cowling, there was oil all over the tiny block, thick black oil.

I crashed on a friend’s boat, I didn’t want to take this thing home.  

On Tuesday we went to Dolphin Bay to pick up my stereo so that my friend could use it on a big tri-miran on Friday for a cruise.   We stopped by another guy’s house to look at a well used 60 HP that I might want to buy for the foot.  The parts to fix mine are $780.  The guy wants $1,200 for the motor, but the upper unit is shot.   I will offer $800 for the whole thing.  Not much demand for 60 HP four stroke parts hereabouts.

Back to my house we took my boat and towed it to a fiberglass guy.  He started working on the boat last December.  Nothing is easy in Bocas.   The damn boat almost sunk last month, 10 miles off shore with doctors and nurses and Red Cross people aboard.  It took three people bailing non stop just to keep up.  A shitty patch job had given way when the boat had been rolled up on logs onto the beach.   I will have to post the whole story some day.

Listen, just cut the whole floor out and put in a deck of treated pine.  This floor has been soaked four times.  It will never dry out.   This will shed another 600 pounds, I am guessing and allow for inspection of hull integrity, wiring and cabling.  Simple is better.  Less is more.   Don’t go gringo in Bocas.  Today I will try to negotiate a reasonable price with an unreasonable person.

On Tuesday, I ran into the boat owner and told him my tale.  He asked his favorite mechanic to look at the motor.  The guy found nothing wrong.  Well, he did his usual not much.  I bought some engine cleaner and cleaned off the block and topped it off with oil and took it home.  

I got home to find an Indian sleeping on my couch.  Apparently he had spent two days there.  One of my neighbors decided I needed my house watched as I often don’t go home.   This guy cleared maybe 500 square feet of grass in two days.  That is about an hour’s work.   I didn’t ask him to be there.   I retired to my room to read a book.  Everytime I walked through the living room he did nothing but lay back and watch me.  This is disturbing.  I woke up in the middle of the night parched, reached into my new refrigerator and took out a bottle of water and took a huge swig.   WTF?  I turned on the lights.  It was a bottle of Bulgarian moonshine left by some woman as a gift.   Jesus, I poured it down the drain.

OK dude, you have to go.  I drove the worker back to my neighbors.   I told him I would have to talk with his friend, that I hadn’t asked for him to come sleep at my house.   He did little more than use a massive amount of toilet paper.  Thanks for leaving me none.   No, I have no intention of paying you.  Nothing was clear.  He speaks no English and my Spanish wasn’t up to the task.

So, let’s see, I have a generator to fix, a leaking pool, two boats out of commission, two phones that won’t take a charge and a computer, camera and tablet that have been waiting in Panama City to be repaired for two weeks.  The taxi driver I sent them to went on vacation the day I air shipped them to him.  There are dozens of people I could have used.  Would have been nice to tell me that you were not going to get around to it for a couple of weeks.

The computer I ordered to replace my dead one was never shipped by Amazon to the woman in the states who was coming down here.   My bank had denied payment due to fraud detection based on the new ship to address.  By the time I got back on the internet it was too late to have it shipped as she was leaving at three o’clock in the morning the next day.

One of these days, something is going to go right for me.  It just has to.   In the meantime I will just continue getting shit upon by the universe.

The boat they were renting, a sixty foot trimaran, is desperately in need of some diligence.   A half constructed building has been abandoned, the rent for the location unpaid, the construction company left holding the bag for labor and materials.  Workers have been laid off, unpaid for months of work.

Today I will cut the locks off the trimaran and we shall start to assess the damage.  We are looking for the $180,000 42 foot Beneteau to seize.  Speaking of which, the owner decided that a competent captain cost too much so he had an idiot captain the boat on a charter.   The clown managed to reef it at Coral Key/Crawl Cay.

Boatless, my options for tending to things have been seriously reduced.   First order of business is to attempt to get the foot on my outboard repaired.  This is going to be costly.  I am looking for a 15 HP outboard and will borrow a friend’s 12′ little sailboat to get around in the meantime.

Do I really have to take a water taxi and ride on a bus for an hour to get a price on an outboard?   It ain’t easy here.

My disk drive failed. Last night I started the process of recovering a corrupted LUKS encrypted hard drive. I created a Linux (ubuntu 12) bootable thumb drive.

It took three attempts to get the computer. To boot.  I entered the crazy long password. The partition that holds root was marked dirty.  An fsck and it was mountable, but had thousands of bad files, irrecoverable I/O errors.

My important partition was apparently in better shape. I cleared some space on an external hard drive and started recovering what I could. 400 MB from a wonky hard drive to another drive over USB 2.0. This was going to take all night.

I plugged in my cell phone and retired with a book.

I woke, made a cup of coffee and sat down ready to receive the bad news. The screen went into death throws. The computer is pining for the fjords.

I was going to make a phone call, but… the phone was dead.  All night on a new battery with a new charger. I put in a second spare battery and it started charging.  Where are the workers who were to have been here at 7:30?  They showed up an hour later.  Ok guys, empty the cupboards and drawers and clean out all the termite byproducts. I will wait a week and see if the fumigation was successful.

Beto called, he is going to take a water taxi out here and look at my seized outboard.

Lining up the dead soldiers. I have one propane tank not empty. One more coffee and I will put it on the generator and have a cold shower.

A mechanic showed up.  “Jim, pull your boat back here, put down some logs for me to stand on.”  He removed the foot from the outboard.  Seized.  “Put the flywheel cover on.  Put the cowling back on.”  Laziest mechanic ever.  Off to town.  “Jim, carry the foot to my house, I can’t.”  WTF?  He outweighs me by fifty pounds.

More shit to take care of.. I popped back an hour later, the drive roller bearing was in pieces, the needle bearings were shot.   This is going to be expensive.   OK, how much do you want for that Honda 5.5 four stroke outboard?  $550.  Done, if it works.  I called my friend Chris, hey can I use that sailboat on top of Marita for a while?  Sure.

My phone was working fine, then in use was discharged to 6% of battery life.   Overnight it fully discharged and refused to turn on or take a charge.  I borrowed a new battery and the phone worked.  Now I am going to try to charge my battery in another phone, but I doubt that the store will let me do that on their display model.   We shall see.  If I can, I hope the battery is dead as the charger is good, the only other thing would be the USB connector or the circuit board.  Never dropped, never wet, shit just breaks.

My camera has been sent to Panama City, along with a tablet and a netbook computer. The camera was working fine, put away and two days later told me that it was unable to format the SD card.  Hopefully it will just be cleaning of the contacts, but that requires disassembly of the camera, hundreds of tiny screws. 

The keyboard on the netbook just started emitting characters when I wasnt typing.   So, its either the keyboard or the USB bus.  

The tablet is probably not worth fixing, somebody stepped on the screen, the microphone is dead and the USB connector is wonky.

I will try to get some starter cables and connect two giant six volt batteries in series and see if I can desulfate and charge them.  This 240 dollar charger has charging, equalization and desulfation modes, but no settings for six or twenty four volt batteries.  

My propane refrigerator at home is beyond redemption, I need to go to Almirante and buy a high efficiency chest refrigerator for the house.   Now that I have converted my generator to propane this shouldnt be too painful except I wont have a freezer unless I buy another unit.   No room in the kitchen for two, so I will have to put it in the bodega behind my house.

There has been a lot of rain lately, far more than necessary to fill the tanks.  They are overflowing.  A few days of clear weather would be welcome.

Oh yeah, a shitty patch job on the bottom of my boat gave out when it was beached last week.  Rolling it over logs to take it out of the water so the boat wouldnt be tossed resulted in the patch being torn away.   It took three people bailing for two hours just to maintain equilibrium ten miles offshore.  I will go into that story another day.   Much to do today. 

Ahh, the simple life.