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American Spirit II - Day 167; Haircut, Groceries, Laundry, Mast Climbing and Infection Update; Saturday, June 21, 2014



7:55 AM Up. Coffee then breakfast: scrambled eggs, chilled pear halves and bread.

10:45 AM. At hair salon for haircut. Maybe the quickest hair cut I've ever had. 10 minutes? Wish I'd timed it. No shave back of neck and side burns , like is customary at home. Short. Not military short, but short. Cost 25 Fijian dollars, or about $12.50 US. Joel got haircut after me, and the same lady gave him a shampoo first. Same charge - 25 Fijian dollars. Go figure. I think Joel's curly hair scarred the barber. Female barber.

On way back to boat stopped at grocery store. Bought sirloin steaks, chicken, 'American' hot dogs (which cost as much as the sirloin steaks), mandarin oranges in a large can (bought 3 of them - hard to find), BBQ sauce and fruit: pears, apples and bananas. We already had plenty of oranges. The sirloin steaks, price wise, came to about $4.00 US apiece. Not bad. However, no one outside the US has steaks as tender as those we buy in the US. These steaks I'm sure are from New Zealand, and they're probably grass fed and not corn fed. Ours are just juicier and easier to chew. We also bought a tub of vanilla ice cream and a jar of caramel sauce to put on the ice cream.

Back on the boat at 11:40 AM. Put groceries away. We noticed that the rally boat Lluiton was on the mooring ball next to us. Had just come in.

Lunch on the boat at 1:15 PM. We each had one of those expensive foot long 'American' hot dogs. Joel had his plain; mine with one piece of bread as a bun. Most groceries stores around the world so far don't sell hot dog and hamburger buns.

After lunch I winched Joel up the mast, as we were installing another VHF cable and antennae for the AIS. The AIS splitter appeared to be broken, not working, etc. I pulled down the cellular cable thru a hole in the base of the mast. We were getting rid of the cellular cable and repeater (never worked very well), and Joel had taped and tied the new VHF AIS antennae to the cellular cable at the top of the mast, so when I pulled the one down we strung the new cable at the same time. In electrician parlance, we used the 'old' cellular cable as a 'messenger line' in pulling the new one down the mast. The primary risk in doing this is that if the two cables become separated as I pulled them down the mast, that would be a BIG problem.

At 2:30 PM I dingied over to the far side of the marina (not the dingy dock we regularly use) and did our laundry. Three loads for 27 Fijian dollars or $13.50 US. Not bad since a laundry service in some of the other islands costs anywhere from $15 in the Galapagos to $160 or so dollars in Bora Bora. There were two washing machines and two dryers; all of which worked well. The only 'snafu' was that Joel likes to carry paper towels in all of his shorts and pants to use as Kleenex; and when I opened the washing machine after washing his clothes there was so much paper debris in the machine and stuck to all the clothes that I realized immediately I had a serious fire hazard on my hands. The slightest spark and I would have been burned alive. As I shook out the clothes to disengage the dried paper flakes from the clothing and towels, it looked like someone blowing the petals off of daisy flowers. The paper was flying everywhere, floating in the air and covered the floor. It was like a blizzard. Darlene, I'm sure you can back me up on this one. I didn't think it was possible for there to be so much Kleenex in one load of laundry. Once the first two loads were done I put the wet clothes in the 2 available dryers, closed the front doors, put in the token and and shoved the token device into the machine. A light immediately went on on the front of the dryer. Success. Not really. Forty five minutes later I was wondering why the 2 dryers weren't making a lot of noise. I found out that one final step was necessary to start the dryers: push the tiny, white button that says 'push' above it. Who knew? At any rate, I finished the laundry and was back on the boat by 6:30 PM. On the way I went by two really large and tall sail boats in the marina, that were so tall they had 360 degree red lights at the top of their masts to act as airplane beacons so local helicopters and small planes wouldn't run into them. The same type of red light you see on top of TV towers.

Before dinner we had a Captain Morgan and coke/diet coke. Dinner consisted of blackened sirloin steaks cooked on our grill at the back of the boat by Chef Joel, micro waved baked potatoes, chilled pear halves and... vanilla ice cream with caramel sauce on top. The cost of this dinner was probably 1/5 or even less what we were paying at a restaurant in the marina.

From 9:30 PM to 11:30 PM we watched the movie Lone Survivor starring Mark Walberg. Good movie, based on a true story. Bad ending. Its called 'Lone' Survivor for a reason.

At 11:45 PM before going to bed I took off the band aid covering my infection on my right calf. Don't be confused by the term 'band aid.' The band aids I've been using are more like surgical bandages; 6" x 3". Every time you take one off you remove hair with it. If you swim with one of these attached to you, it is not going to come off. Not possible. At any rate, when I took off the band aid for the first time in over 3 weeks there was no spot on the white part of the band aid. In other words, no oozing. Three days ago I had stopped putting antibiotic ointment onto the wound before applying the band aid. The reason was that I thought the ointment was keeping the wound wet and therefore not dry, maybe inhibiting the skin from growing over the small hole left in my leg. I also 3 days ago switched to a different antibiotic, Bactrim, instead of Doxycyline. I think the former measure was the key one; but Joel thinks its the change in antibiotic medication.

Brian Fox


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