Dominos

                                                                                       Jan 19 2014

Greetings,

          I can now call myself a cruiser. Today I had my first Mexican train dominos experience. As we have been cruising, we have heard people talking on the VHF cruiser nets about getting together for Mexican train dominos. It’s a popular social activity in the cruising world. But, before today, we had not participated. Well, now we’ve been properly integrated into the social world of cruisers. I won’t go into the details of how the game is played here, but it was lots of fun and I’m sure we will join again at some point.

          When we left the game we had another first. A bum was sleeping in Hook when we got back to the dock to head back out to Second Star. We head actually seen him the night before. When we’d gone to the store he had told us he would watch the boat while we were gone and then held his hand out for money. Johne said when we got back. If he’d been there when we got back Johne was going to give him a little something but he wasn’t. So, after we woke him up and told him it was time to get off, he got his stuff together (a backpack and the cardboard boxes he’d been sleeping under), climb off the boat and held his hand out for money. Johne told him he was lucky we didn’t call the police. I thought it was pretty ballsy to try to charge us for sleeping in the launch. I thought maybe we should have asked him for rent.

          In other news, it does look like we’re going to be departing Cartagena this week. The weather is calming enough that we’re going to go for it. It’s not going to be as calm as I’d prefer, but to wait for that we’d probably be here until April. Right now the plan is to head out Tuesday evening. There is a big river that flows out by Santa Marta and, we’ve heard, you want to cross it in good light to avoid all the debris that flows down river. We’ll time it to get there in the morning on Wednesday. There are some bays on the north side of Colombia that we can stop in if it gets too rough or we want to rest, but we’ll head for Curacao as quickly as we can safely go. I’m looking forward to getting there. It looks like a really neat place.