Cruising your sailboat to exotic locations means you get to do all your maintenance and repairs in exotic locations! I feel like I am almost caught up.  I have an oil change on the generator left to do, and then the cycle starts over again! Having a boat with all kind of modern conveniences is great, but every piece of gear comes with a manual that lists its maintenance needs. Individually it never seems like much, but if you have 300 pieces of gear and each one requires maintenance of sort sort once a year, you almost have a full time job. And that’s not even counting any repairs that might be needed.

We are in the Blue Haven Marina on the east end of Providenciales.  A beautiful marina, with easy access to the ocean. Unusually in this part of the world, it has floating docks. Since the tide range hear is small, about 2 feet, very few marinas invest in the luxury of floating dock pontoons. Somethings are a bit pricey. Electricity, for example, is metered at the boat, and costs $0.60/kW-hr, about 4 or 5 times what you would pay stateside. Here on the desert island water costs $0.12/gallon, so you wash the boat with a bit of water economy you might not otherwise use.

When we first cleared in the the Turks and Caicos through customs and Immigration, they cleared us in for seven days. Today we finished the process of getting out Cruising permit from Customs that allows us to keep the boat here for 30 days without paying an import duty, and our 30 day visas from Immigration. So now we are “Legal” until the end of February.

This afternoon my brother and his wife will be flying in and joining us for a week or so.  Hopefully we can get some good fish catching done while he is here.

Right now we have typical tropical weather:  Sunny, with some very widely scattered showers around, temperatures in the low 80’s during the heat of the day, and a delightful cooling breeze.  In the bar at the resort yesterday they had a sports channel on the big screen.  The featured event was some kind of snowboarding competition.  It was truly jarring. My first thought was, “Where is there snow in the middle of summer?”  Then I remembered, “Oh, Yeah…”