SMALL STUFF

Mostly I don't sweat the small stuff but the last few days have been trying.

MOORING
I got a local guy to lay me a mooring. Which he did and I am happy with mooring and he was pretty prompt.

But he was supposed to register it with the government in my name. He now come up with a story that says he has had to register it in his name along with some others.

When he laid it he did not have a buoy so borrowed a fender from me. 7 weeks of promises every Friday [ he drives the shopping bus ] and I still have no mooring ball. So it looks like I have to abandon my fender when I go North.

COOKER
My Force 10 cooker has 4 burners three are small, one of the small ones has always been wimpy but the others are now wimpy too. This did not matter as the big one did the business and I could swap things around.

But the flame failure device on the big one has failed and it turns out that I will have to dismantle the whole top of the cooker to get this fixed. An attempt to do so soon showed that a key part is cast from a very low grade alloy and that the screws used are made from something close to cream cheese. N.B. This is a seriously expensive, top of the range, supposedly MARINE grade cooker.

I called in a local called David Benoit who is the goto guy on cookers and between us we managed to drill out and clean out 3 burners. So the good news is my coffee will not take 30 minutes to make in the morning.

WILD WET AND WINDY
I was planning to be up in Cariacou by now. The hurricane center keeps warning of waves coming off Africa with "potential". Well we have just have had a succession of these waves giving 30 knot + squalls thunderstorms and heavy rain. One just like these developed into Hurricane Tomas with no warning and only 18 hours from Carriacou.

FINALLY MY ONLY IN AMERICA MOMENT

Man injured by pine cone in San Francisco park sues the US government for $5m. Ha I thought another crazy. But it turns out that the guy got beaned by a 7kg "Bunya" pine cone which fractured his skull.

Which reminds me not to walk under coconut trees as around 150 people are killed by falling coconuts every year.