A nice movie

Last night, they showed the movie “Time on Ice” here in the marina’s “club house” for the boaters. It is about the 40ft steel sailboat Northern Light and their trip in 1989/90 to Winter over in Antarctica. Very well done I thought.

When I Googled it all I found was info on a book. (The Internet at the marina is especially bad recently. They say that the whole town is having trouble. A bad main cable somewhere.)
http://www.amazon.com/Time-Ice-Winter-Voyage-Antarctica/dp/0070063990

Often a book is better, but I only know the DVD. Here is a link to some more similar stuff. Note that these listings are NOT shown in correct order on the page that I saw. That is for you to solve.
http://www.cruisingworld.com/tags/northern-light

We saw the boat ‘Northern Light’ in Tahiti in 1978 and have seen her docked here and there, several times, in our travels, but have not yet met the humans aboard. They are prolific sailors and love the Polar regions.

Nice flick.

I have found a bottom paint that is said to be better than our former, now very hard to get, paint. It is, of course, very, very expensive. But, available. There is said to be a Turkish paint, just as good for 1/4th the price. So, I am trying to learn just how good it really is, as the cost of the paint is only a small fraction of the total cost. Haul out, labor, dangerous chemicals, the bother of each step of the process, and stuff growing on the bottom of your boat are all major problems, too. But, I hate to just throw money at it. More expensive is very often NOT better. Especially with bottom paint and boats in general. But, how to know? And it is like religion and politics. EVERYONE has a strong opinion and few know didly about it.

And, Thursday, I think I will take the early bus to Antalya (about 2 hrs each way). I am looking for various boat things. I have found ways to find some info on Google and am putting waypoints into the GPS and planning a route, but, often when you get there, they throw you curve after curve and you need to constantly revise ‘the best laid plans.’ At least now I have a tiny black box that (usually) gets Internet from the cell phone system. So, I can find any shady table and get online to help revise my Quest.

There very well could be a system wide Internet problem, because the tiny black box gets Internet a very different way than the marina and if both are having trouble, then it could be a problem with a major trunk line somewhere. I think we were in Spain, when the major undersea Internet line from Egypt to Crete, or some such, went out. So what? Right? What difference will that make in Spain? But we were told that the whole system got overloaded trying to re-rout the traffic and the Internet was very poor for months. So, it is hard to know if it is a local or systemic problem.

Perhaps Cyprus defaulted on the electric bill to the relay station.

Bank of America gave me some more gray hairs. And I pulled some more out. They “upgraded” my special credit card for international travel which finally ended up OK, but for quite a while seemed like they had lost all of their marbles and wouldn’t know one if they saw it. My card was useless. Cut it up. Then it wasn’t. Maybe. They weren’t sure. They would send me a new card. I would get it in 6 weeks or so. What chaos! But, as I say, it worked out OK in the end. Only a few hours lost solving it.

Travel is not for the faint of heart.

There are a few more things gone from the boat and there is a little less chaos, but I try to concentrate on things that will let me launch ASAP. That progresses, but slowly. I hope that trip to Antalya will boost things.

Dave

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