SAN

three hulls, two people, one trip around the world…

Running out of Pudding …

The state of emergency is looming: The last 3 packs of Pardiescreme and the last pack of Mouse au Chocolat !  🙁 😢

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Yes, yes, I know, you can make your own pudding. But you have to consider that on board there is one person who has only swung the cooking spoon three times in his whole life and one person who doesn’t always feel like cooking, but two people who like to eat desserts. So a bag of paradise cream mixture is a precious asset 😉 Especially as there are now only 2 packs of paradise cream left …..

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Busfahren

The bus route to the train station and the supermarket is now part of our everyday life here. But I never very much liked to take the bus. This attitude is probably due to a trauma that I got when I took the bus alone in Tokyo about 27 years ago. I wanted to visit a friend in hospital who just had a baby. But I had to travel a long way by bus. I drove around Tokyo for 5 hours that day. On the bus they don’t announce stops, there are no addresses in Tokyo and even if there were, I couldn’t read the signs anyway. At that time I managed to get to my friend and back home, but I still don’t know how I did it. All I know is that I have avoided taking the bus ever since. Luckily my route here is almost from one end of the line to the other end. I have got used to the turnstiles in the bus, usually hold the ticket the right way round at the ticket machines and sometimes even the stops are announced. But, of course, I recognize my stop meanwhile without announcement. The buses drive quite often, have air conditioning and one simply has to like them, specially the contradictory destination board at the front makes one smile, it changes between “Quedate en casa” and “movemos Panama”. A symbol for “loosen the lock down or not loosen it – that’s the question.”

But I haven’t unraveled all the secrets of bus driving. Our bus stop is almost at the end of the island, the bus only makes a small round and then passes again on the opposite lane. Some people get in on our side of the road, take the small round in the air-conditioned bus and then continue towards the city. Once a bus driver picked me up in the “wrong” direction. But normally I stand on the correct side of the street at the bus stop. The other day I thought: “What the heck, I’ll get on the bus on this side” and waited at the bus stop, direction out of the city. The bus just drove past me. There was plenty of time to cross the street and get a lift to the city, but why it didn’t work to get picked up, remained a mystery. Probably it depends, like everywhere in the world, on how nice the bus driver is or how much in a hurry he is.

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Success !!!

The problem of the bicycle patches that refused to stick did not get any better when we managed to get thicker patches and glued them with the help of dinghy repair glue. Finally we resorted to a cunning ruse – we bought a new tube 🙂

Now, that is no easy task, if you are only allowed to move around on land with restrictions and not all shops are open. But, three cheers to the corner shop at the station! Besides various electronics and car parts, it carries not only patches but also bicycle inner tubes! The friendly helper behind the counter somehow always understands what I want from him. Then he takes a flashlight and disappears through one of the doors behind the counter into the back of the shop. With the flashlight he probably illuminates the last corners of the shelves and always finds what I am looking for.

In hindsight we suspect that the old tube was too thin. When it was pumped up to the required pressure, the patch could not expand accordingly.

The shop with all the spare parts ❤️❤️❤️

With the bike ready for use I set off for another supermarket, which is further away, but is supposed to have a different assortment than our regular supermarket. It is only about 8 km away, but officially only 2 hours are allowed for shopping plus travelling time. In order to be able to travel fast, I used the electric assistance for the bike on the outward journey (level 2), on the way back I had to use level 3. The route was a bit challenging for a 15-week-couch-potato like me. Luckily it leads through parks along the water with quite good bike paths for most of the way. The supermarket is bigger than ours at the train station and has a slightly different range of products. So the trip can be included in our list of things to do. 

Look closely – not only cats are being fed

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Day-to-Day

Electricity consumption: 7.4 kWh per day on average. Freezer and refrigerator are always on. 2 computers and telephones are regularly charged. The water purifier runs for several hours every 2nd-3rd day. At night anchor light and the globe are on. The washing machine runs several times a week, but does not consume much in eco mode. Hot water for washing up is produced by a kettle and cooking with a rice cooker and induction hotplate also happens almost daily. The toilet flush is electric. Fans run and a dehumidifier for one hour in the morning.

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You gotta move:

Like so many others, I, too, thought about how to keep fit in a confined space. So, I tried “Yoga with Adriene”. This is a good mixture of movement and relaxation. Mathias didn’t last long, for his taste the trainer talks too much, but I like it that way 😉

As yoga mat serves an old camping mat. Hard to believe that this mat was once the thicker version of our camping mats. In our youth we made several bike trips with the tandem. Of course there was only one bag for both of us together. Back then we discussed for a long time how many briefs each of us was allowed to take with us. And because for a tandem, like a multi-hull sailing boat, you have to keep additional load as low as possible, the thickness of the mats was a real criterion. But later we bought other mats for camping and they became thicker and thicker, because lying on a mat became more and more uncomfortable. Must have been due to the global hardening of the earth’s crust in the last 35 years 😉 🙂

Yoga on board is different. Some poses are not so easy to do when the floor is constantly swaying slightly. That starts with “standing on one leg”. But even when relaxing on your back, sometimes you have the option of gently rocking back and forth to massage your spine. No problem, works automatically for me, the boat does it for me.

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What else happened:

Our life buoy has become independent. Probably because a pelican was sitting on the railing. Unfortunately the buoy has a cartridge with which it is inflated automatically. Now we have to buy a new cartridge – another challenge.

If there is a plumping noise next to the bed in the morning, it was a pelican throwing itself into the water.

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The rudder blade has been cleaned. I have managed to dive a little deeper. You can hold on to the blue suction cup and take momentum to dive down:

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Mathias’ hair was cut. He had also shaved off his beard and looked 10 years younger. 🙂

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We removed the petrol engine from the dinghy and replaced it with a Torqueedo electric motor. For the short rides without big waves, which we do here, it is completely sufficient. We have plenty of electricity, and this way can save gasoline.

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Silent dinghy in the twilight

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