Saturday was mainly a shopping day. We needed some boat parts, some more food and weapons of war against the mosquitoes and ants who’s numbers were rising again. We left the boatyard shortly before 8am on a 15 minute walk up to the road to catch the bus into St George’s. On the bus, as it careered at high speeds through winding roads stuffed full of people, we felt very much back in the Caribbean.
Our first stop was Island Water World to see if they had a better selection of bolts than their outlet here in Grenada Marine. We need particular sized bolts to attach the cone shaped zincs on the end of our props. The last ones had hex key (allen key) heads which were all mushed up requiring me to cut of the zincs and remove them using grips. Not finding them meant we had to take another bus to Budget Marine in Prickly Bay.
The Budget Marine store had many sizes. I bought the ones I needed plus others a little longer and shorter just in case. We also met up with Jim who’s anchored there to collect our replacement salinity probes. Not sure if I’d mentioned this before but given that we’ve now suffered two failures, Spectra sent us two replacements, free of charge, just in case.
Next stop was ACE hardware store to pick up a bunch of stuff including the first elements of our arsenal against the invaders. This included an insect zapper that looks like a little tennis racket but generates a high voltage across a string of separated grids. I was keen to try this out.
Then it was back on the bus into the center of St Georges where we went to the other ACE store to pick up some Combat Ant Killer – the stuff that Jim believed the best.
Then it was lunch off the market square where we had roties and local juice. They had three juices available and we were allowed to try all three. The last, a favourite of the locals, tasted of aniseed and was quite sharp leaving a tingling on our tounges. We opted for the cherry flavoured juice.
Finally we picked up fruit, some mosquitoes sprays and a little more food and were back on the bus back to the boat. I was ready to go on the attack with the 
insects but we discovered the situation all changed. Ant corpses littered the boat with just a few stragglers wondering around. It looked like the doses from the previous day had really kicked in so it was not necessary to lay down any more.
The heat was too much to do anything until about 3:30. I then set about grinding off a lot of the calcification on the props and fitted the zincs. They needed some drilling out as the new bolts didn’t quite fit but soon I had it all sorted. I wasn’t able to completely decalcify the props but got some advice from a worker who was here doing the gelcoat work (finally). He advised me to get some acid from the store to paint on and dissolve the remaining calcium. I’ll do that.
Next was replacing the faulty salinity probe with one of the new ones. In principal this shouldn’t be hard but it does mean working in the space under the floors. All the cable tied had to be removed and the control box cover removed. This was quite difficult as one of the screws is in a very awkward place. Once the old probe is removed, the new one has to be screwed in, the wires laid, the cables bunches retied and everything closed up. In the confined space and in the heat I felt like I lost a pint of sweat doing this. Hopefully this will all work. If we were in the water I would not have finished up the work without testing. However, I’m taking a chance that all will be ok.
Beers were then necessary then a shower. While we were quaffing the beers, Helen scored the first kill with the bug zapper. When she was in the shower, I scored three more including one that left this world with the sound of an electrical clap. Ahhh – the sweat pleasure of vengeance.
After that it was dinner – vegetable samosas and vegetable soup. Helen’s a role to get us to lose some of the weight we acquired in the Uk and South Africa. We finished the evening watching couple of TV shows we’d downloaded. We managed to stay awake until 8pm last night which was an improvement on the day before.
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