Stuck in Aruba with the busted boat blues again

Paardenbaai, Aruba, 4-FEB-2022 – Yes, I’m still here.

There is a frustration with blogging in a world that is changing. If I can get the words down in a specific moment in time, then I can edit them at my leisure. I didn’t get this written last night when the world was at a momentary stasis.

That moment passed and by this morning things changed.

Yes, I’m still in Aruba. No, the parts aren’t here. No, we don’t know where the parts are. No, we don’t know when they will arrive. None of that has changed.

What has changed is we no longer need to race into the wind up to St. Maarten.

The couple chartering Z2, as I’m referring to this vessel, will instead fly to Aruba to meet us here. They will arrive five days earlier than they would have in St. Maarten.

If they could have kept the same day, that would have given us five extra days to make sure everything is going well.

To be exact, there is only one part missing. It is about 3 inches long and made out of stainless steel. There is discussion as to whether it is machined or drop forged. It’s called a toggle, although nothing moves; it extends the length of the forestay.

We would have needed to have been gone by Tuesday at the very latest to get to St. Maarten in time, and that was looking less and less viable. Sailboats should not have schedules, only destinations. 

It’s possible the part will show up on Sunday. The airline to whom the part was given has recently written that with the tracking number that was sent to them, they will begin looking for the part. They have no idea where it is.

While we’ve been waiting, I’ve been living a little bit of the Caribbean vacation life. I’ve also spent some time in the company of “men.”

On Wednesday, James came out to Z2, which is anchored in the middle of the bay to pick me up to go help med-tie Zach’s boat into its slip. This involves backing the vessel into the dock while picking up a mooring ball at the bow and then tying the two corners of the stern to the dock. With experience is easily done, but Zach is completely devoid of that experience. James and I are amused, annoyed, shocked and in awe of the things people will do with no experience of any sort, and often times we think they may not have even given it any forethought – not the case with Zach, but a mutual acquaintance just revealed he bought his 44 ft sailboat and sailed 1200 nautical miles without ever having sailed a boat before.

It is clear that James enjoys using his 7-foot dinghy as a tugboat to move good-sized sailing boats around. The damage that Zach would have caused on his own backing into that slip without James to make corrections would have been colossal. When it was done, James had had a great time and Zach was safely tied up.

Video editing for Zingaro is done by a lovely woman in Australia, who has a story all her own, which was featured on the American news program Sixty Minutes. To get the video to Australia, James must upload roughly a third of a terabyte of data; the cellular network, being both slow and expensive, is insufficient. Tuesday night was a failure when the B&B that James wanted to rent canceled on him, so Wednesday night I asked my friend Michela to let us leave James’ laptop overnight.

On the walk from Zacks to the restaurant, we met Rose, a wonderful and very wonderfully out-there twenty-five-year-old Dutch woman. She was seated on a bulkhead in a parking lot holding a live lobster to her ear as if it was a telephone and carrying on an imaginary conversation. Rose mugged for the camera.

I was becoming a member of the community. We met Anthony and his charter crew, Ivan and his younger brother, and strolled with them all making small talk and laughing through the parking lot where they all crowded into a pickup truck, with James, Ana, and I continuing to the restaurant and Rose promising to meet us later.

Paddock is a restaurant on the water, which I stayed out of because I thought it was expensive. It is a Dutch restaurant and very reasonable. A corner of its menu is completely Dutch and I wanted to order from there because it is food I know and miss by not spending a week a month in Amsterdam anymore. But, they had all-you-can-eat ribs for seventeen dollars US, and I could not pass it up.

We settled on some couches in the extreme left corner of the restaurant’s dock. It’s a space that could easily seat eight or nine. Within a few minutes Zach and Kai and a new friend who had just flown in, Chris, joined us.

These are men that I don’t normally deal with. They live without women as part of their continuous life, but intersect with them in bars and venues designed for people to meet. They are at times rough and ready, and their relationship with women is so much different than mine.

Against all of my stereotypes, I have always found these men to be warm, open, caring, and supportive of me. And so it was with the three of them. They wanted to go to a karaoke bar, I wasn’t sure why, to pick up women I supposed. Once there the alcohol started flowing, but they came there to sing karaoke!

Kai has an amazing country music voice: a wonderful style. Chris does very well, and Zack sings as remarkably poorly as I do, but it never stops him from singing his heart out. They made me feel welcome, encouraged me to “sing.” And with James who has, or had, a professional-quality voice sang those songs that are part of the American pop 60s through 80s songbook, together, remarkably, and somehow with their shirts off. Although to be honest, I can’t quite construct how that happened.

In one of the two private rooms was a bachelorette party. We watched some strange-looking guy arrive, disappear into a bathroom, and come out dressed like a crusader. Peeking in through the door we watched him dance, parade, and strip for the screaming, laughing women.

The four men I was with look like I did when I was at that age: buff, with cut muscles from hours and hours at a gym. Chris carried heavy bulky muscle, the other three are lean.

The stripper left when the rental on the room expired. The women returned to the main bar area laughing and talking. The bar closed at midnight and we all gathered on the covered sidewalk outside. The women settled onto some benches. The seven of us decided the women would enjoy the four men, shirtless, joining them for a few moments. It would be great fun. The man who walked over into the group, Zach it was, I think, climbed into the rafters and hung like Spiderman above the group. James teased and joked with the bride-to-be. One of the bachelorettes looked over Chris as if he was a cut of prime beef, and everyone laughed, the cacophony of joy rising like steam from a boiling pot.

We all generally said why don’t you come back to the boat with us. There was talking in the group and general confusion, but a few of the women came over to me and asked exactly where the boat was.

As we all got into cars to leave, James, being stone-cold sober, driving, our group came to the majority view that they wouldn’t show. I countered that some of them probably would, given the detail they wanted in directions to get to Zach’s boat.

As we drove into the parking lot, we were leading a train of three cars full of women. Within a half-hour, all eighteen had shown up and were on board. It was a joyous spectacle of people crammed into the main cabin of this sailing vessel with blasting music and everyone dancing. Seated up in the cockpit with me were two or three other women who came with the group but did not descend into the mosh pit. The mob of women downstairs, dancing with each other and the other men, ranged in age from barely 22 probably about sixty. The women in the cockpit with me were, uniformly, middle 30s. I asked them, individually, who they each were. I learned a little bit of each of their histories and that they were supervisors of the women dancing below in a group of restaurants where everyone worked. They felt they needed to attend as a social responsibility, and each felt the responsibility to make sure these women, especially the younger women, don’t do something too stupid.

By 3 AM, James Anna and I were back aboard Z2. I slept in late and was up about 715. James was up an hour later and we started our day.

One must keep busy while waiting for parts.