Pre- wedding Episodes: the Rum Punch Contest

With all the commotion and chaos and stuff leading up to the wedding party, I really didn’t find the time to write about all those fun and interesting events that are/were wedding related. I can’t remember how we did find the time and energy to get involved (or dragged) into it all, but I’d like to share some of the stories over the next couple of weeks!

One of the things I wanted to do after the wedding ceremony on the beach, was offer Caribbean rum punch to all our guests, while family portraits would be taken and the sun supposedly set behind the watery horizon. For months, I had this great plan of inviting a whole bunch of friends into Irie’s cockpit and experiment with rum and other liquids. Finally, less than two weeks before the big event, an unofficial invitation went out and about ten people showed up for Irie’s Rum Punch Contest.

Mark and I provided a whole array of ingredients, from nutmeg to hot pepper sauce, from bitters to triple sec, different kinds of rum and tons of healthy Ceres juices. The crew of SV Mojomo provided their own secret ingredients and arrived with a secret recipe and a blender. Cheaters! After offering some nibbles to line our stomachs, the contest was open. Everybody present was supposed to make a full pitcher of their own rum punch creation, all ingredient combinations were allowed. One by one, Rosie, Sim, Jon, Sam, Matt, Denise, Axel, Liz, Mike, Mark and I did our best to please the thirsty crowd.

The more choices of ingredients, the more stuff you are inclined to put into the mixture, with as a result that nobody remembered what went into their creation by the end of the evening. Mike’s didn’t have much more than rum in it, just the way he likes it and the trend went from a yellow solution to darker and darker red, the more the evening progressed… Everybody loved the Mojomo rum punch, but because it was so sophisticated, Mark and I decided to keep it a bit simpler for the final beach event. The consensus and main conclusion of the tasting was that a good rum punch requires passion fruit juice and lots of rum!

Of course, the day of the wedding, things went a bit crazy and I almost forgot to make the pitchers of rum punch to follow the beach ceremony. At that point I didn’t really care too much about the ingredients, but remembered the passion fruit juice. I started pouring -oops, a bit too much rum – and mixing, throwing the main rum punch ingredients together. The outcome was something like 1/3 of white rum, 1/3 of passion fruit juice, 1/3 half and half orange juice and pineapple juice, a splash of grenadine and ice when served by our beautiful ad accommodating (“We won’t take anything back to the villa, it all has to be drunk! Here, take some more!”) hosts Sim and Jon. And yes, I did forget one ingredient: freshly grated nutmeg. But, the concoction was strong enough to make sure nobody noticed!

Photos courtesy of Axel Busch and Liesbet Collaert

Grenada Marine Boat Yard: A Painful Experience

Our return to Grenada on December 5^th 2010 wasn’t in the least bit fun or comfortable. Not only were we extremely sad to return without Darwin, but the plane arrived with a delay and Mark and I were the last ones off and, consequently, through immigration. Luckily, our cab driver Mandoo was still around and brought us back to Irie at Grenada Marine boat yard in St. David’s. His friendliness and courtesy are always appreciated and fit the welcoming and kind attitude of most Grenadians. It was past 11pm by then and we had to cross a soggy swamp before we could board our boat with eight pieces of luggage. By the time our cockpit was cleared of dangerous lines, a loose solar panel and a friend’s outboard engine, the next day had started.

Life in a boat yard is never fun, but most of the time we manage and try to get used to the sweat on our faces and bodies, the heaps of mosquitoes, the dirt and grime, the manual labor and the busy schedule. It’s a part of boat ownership. Grenada Marine proved to be more challenging than any of the other handful of boat yards we have stayed before, however. Our friends from SV Imagine had noticed that Irie was surrounded by water and had basically been put in “a swamp with lots of frogs and mosquitoes”. Upon hearing this, we asked the yard manager to move Irie to higher and drier ground, so we could work in relative comfort for a week. Obviously, that request had been denied or never got through…

Instead, our bare feet were exposed to water and chemicals the whole time, we dragged and kicked up mud everywhere we went, the power supply was inefficient and unreliable (no air conditioning for us, let alone decent use of power tools) and the water pressure was VERY sporadic, especially when needed most. After a long day of heavy, dirty and sweaty labor, Mark and I would walk to the showers for a serious clean-up, only to find a trickle of (cold) water emerging from the shower heads and full toilet bowls with no water to flush them. The psychological pain of loosing Darwin was soon augmented by physical pain from having to squat many times a day (the wet ground did not allow us to sit or kneel in hard to reach places) and strained muscles.

Mark and I pushed through, worked around the rainstorms and managed to complete a lot of projects while on the hard. We meticulously prepped Irie’s bottom – scraping hundreds of calcium deposits (we removed the barnacles before we left in September), sanding the two hulls, washing everything down and taping the borders – before we applied a barrier coat in the worst places and painted the area 2.5 times. Mark did the same with our sail drives and we managed to fix some dinghy leaks and install a new cooling system for the fridge. That required a newly drilled hole under the waterline, a scary but successful endeavor.

After a little over a week, we needed to pay our bill. All the employees and workers in the boat yard are very friendly, but we counted on the unprofessionalism of the office staff to miscalculate the bill in our advantage. That would have made up for some of our “suffering”. The bill did come back with an error in every department. In our disadvantage, of course. It took another half an hour to set a few things straight, while Irie was hanging in the travel lift. Then, we chased the remaining frogs away, took a few fat mosquitoes with us and sailed away from St. David’s Harbour with a new looking Irie. Under the waterline anyway…

All is Irie with The Wirie

Over the last few months, Mark and Tim have been working extra hard on improving The Wirie and the website. From his nice, comfortable house in cold Massachusetts, Tim communicated over Skype with his brother Mark in the meager living space of Irie, located in the warm climate and pretty environments of the Caribbean. Together, they figured a whole bunch of stuff out and shared their thoughts and ideas during daily chat sessions. I helped by reviewing documents, writing some PR stuff and making Mark’s (sometimes frustrating) life a bit easier.

The result of our effort, time investment, research and team work is an improved Wirie ready for sale on the website (www.thewirie.com) and for the press. The new stainless steel bracket is custom made to fit horizontal and vertical poles as well as standard antenna mounts, a higher power 1000mW WiFi unit replaces the 500mW unit, the website focuses on Wirie use in the boating and the RV (recreational vehicle) world, Windows 7 got its own manual and the manuals for all the other operating systems (Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac) are updated. The FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page is enriched with extra information, other long range WiFi solutions were researched, the product comparison chart has more competitors on it, our customer service department is constantly providing advice and help, more unsolicited testimonials show how pleased our customers are and many more positive changes have been made to the site and the business operation.

Mark and Tim also tested a new WiFi unit that claims to be 2 Watts and supports the N protocol. It didn’t take them long, however, to discover that the internet connections with this unit lack reliability and are actually weaker than the 1000mW unit when used with the more frequently available B and G protocols. They concluded to not use this unit until improvements are made and results show that it is indeed better than the unit we currently use in The Wirie.

Working from pretty places scattered through the Caribbean islands over the last months has been enjoyable enough, but now it is time for the “real world”! Once in St. Martin, Mark and I will have a full time job taking care of boat projects, getting our life back on track, earning some money doing random jobs, advertising The Wirie and running the business with Tim.

With this different kind of blog, I wanted to give some insight about what else is going on in this little boat and this big world of ours. It’s not all sightseeing, relaxing and fun here on Irie, although we can’t complain about this last week. Mark and I decided to go on vacation to Barbuda and actually try to relax a bit. We did succeed splendidly and even read a couple of books, until we found a great internet signal in front of an 11 mile deserted beach! Well, I guess the beach isn’t totally deserted, based on that one building a couple of miles down. That Wirie, I tell ya…

New Year’s Eve in the Caribbean

Mark and I never used to eat out much, mostly for financial reasons. But, once in a while we would like to celebrate something or we (think we) deserve a treat. Those times, we expect some good food and service for the hard earned or hard saved money we spend on a meal. The prospect of no dishes and no cooking in a hot kitchen would be an added bonus.

Performing such an easy task as having a decent, affordable dinner and be pleased is challenging in the Caribbean. Over the last one and a half years, we have tried multiple times and failed more than not. Bear in mind, though, that we are not on vacation, always ask or check prices ahead of time, always look at our bill, hate it to be taken advantage of and, that we have certain expectations, like a friendly face and an honest atmosphere, and certain principles in the lines of “Don’t play (tourist) games with us”! Is that too much to ask for?

So, when Mark and I go out to eat, we never know what to expect, except not to expect too much. We still get excited about treating ourselves sometimes and do give it another try, only to find out that the restaurant of our choice is closed, the prices have gone up, Darwin is not allowed, people are not friendly, many items on the menu are not available, a surprise tax or mandatory tip is added or the bill is wrong.

On Christmas Day, we tried our luck in St. Pierre, Martinique. The only restaurant that looked alive closed at 3 pm and was pretty expensive. Dinner (packaged stuffing, eggplant and slices of lunch meat ham) on Irie was tasty and cheap and I did leave the dishes until the next morning. Not too bad.

On New Year’s Eve, we were serious about eating out and decided to go to Big Papa’s near our anchorage in Prince Rupert Bay, Dominica. The town of Portsmouth doesn’t have much to offer and we were pleased by the atmosphere of this restaurant and by our meeting with Big Papa himself, about five months ago. We started off with a few Happy Hour drinks. The Big Papa rum punch was half price, we were told, so we would get two for EC$ 10 (US$ 4). Two small plastic cups with a yellow liquid showed up and we enjoyed the taste of it, but wondered about the size. It’s a common trick here. They offer a drink for Happy Hour, but reduce the size with the price…

When I asked about the size of the drink, one of the waitresses admitted that the normal rum punches came in a bigger “real” glass. But, it was New Year’s Eve and we were trying to have a good time, so I ordered another Big Papa rum punch, the only thing that seemed to be on special. Mark ordered a local (Kubuli) beer. My ordered drink was orange this time and tasted different than the previous one, not as good, and I inquired. Now, this was the Big Papa rum punch and the previous one was a normal rum punch. OK. Well, then I wanted my second part of the order to be a normal one! This appeared to be the only option, because one of the women declared there was no Big Papa rum punch available. One of the waitresses was leaving, there was some confusion, I made sure they realized that this drink was the second part of my “two for one” rum punch and got another beer for Mark, while wondering what they would charge for my two different punches in the same order.

After three drinks each (three 2 for 1 rum punches for me and one 2 for 1 rum punch and two beers for Mark), we decided to swallow hard about the unfriendliness and incapability of the staff and go for a Big Papa Hamburger. It was New Year’s Eve after all! When we ordered, the waitress announced that they didn’t do the snack menu in the evening, so we gave in and asked for the bill. Big Papa recognized us (or was it Darwin?) from our last visit and we had a friendly chat. He wouldn’t make us burgers, though, a “cook’s nightmare”, apparently. Not sure why, apart from this being a good way to make more money by “forcing” you to order a more expensive meal. Not us…

We were a little hyped up by now and sure anticipated the bill to be wrong. The drinks should cost EC$ 30 (US$ 12). How bad would it be? Bad! We owed Big Papa’s EC$ 60. Twice the price! They charged EC$ 10 for every single tiny rum punch and EC$ 10 for every beer, which has a fixed price of EC$ 5. Mmmm… After some questioning, the mistake about the beer was obvious, but some more arguments later, the Big Papa rum punch (of which I had 1 instead of 2) appeared to be EC$ 15 during happy hour (????) at which point we gave in and paid the EC$ 35. We’ve learned to sacrifice small amounts of money for everybody’s peace and just never go back. Needless to say, no tip was given and we were very happy about not purchasing a meal there that night.

On Irie, some cheap champagne, a delicious spaghetti carbonara and Belgian chocolates for dessert pleased our tummies and our moods. Once again, we were better off having our dinner at home, but that evening we had realized it in time!

Last year, Mark, Darwin and I thought about the recent loss of Kali and wept ourselves asleep on the trampoline, to be woken up by fireworks at midnight, in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas (USVI). This year we didn’t make January 1^st at all, until the next morning. We tried to stay up for a few hours, but were sound asleep by 10:30 pm! New Year’s Eve was pretty much a day like any other day.