Cricalix.Net

Squall in the night; proper tropical one that dumps several litres of water on you in a minute or two.  Compounding the normal squall rain were the rain scoops, sorry windscoops.  A mad dash to get the hatches closed.

Up around 06:30, with a breakfast of Tea Times, tea and oats.

On the ‘Sailing’ channel, we noticed that the gent sailing the board with anchor trouble had his head in the anchor locker again, so Dad and I loaded the toolbox into the dinghy and rowed across to see if we could lend assistance.  Alas, we could not; the windlass had cheared the bold that is used to mesh the clutch.  Result?  No windlass and 150 feet of chain to haul by hand.  Nick, the charterer, said he’d been in contact with the charter company.

Repaired the dinghy today.  The plastic engine mount on the transom had sheared two bolt heads, so we cleaned off some paint and bonded the plastic to the metal with some epoxy.  1 hour later, perfectly set.

Around 11:30, tired of the construction noise, we headed for Chatham Bay (lee side of Union Island).  A slight hash with the windlass, as I didn’t notice the chain building up as it went into the anchor locker, and jammed the windlass.  Easily sorted.

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The windscoops worked a treat; a very pleasant night indeed.  Breakfast was Gran’s banana bread, tea and fresh air.  Broke out the epoxy and fixed a broken drawer, one half of the leaf tables in the cockpit and one of the rope tidys.  The engine mount on the dinghy can wait.

Went ashore just after 08:00 to get some more EC, fresh bread and sunblock (a dirty suspicion that the stuff we have is too old).  Then across to the Internet cafe/Digicel store to post yesterday’s account, and down to Marianne’s to get some homemade icecream.  Back to the boat at full speed, trying to get the icecream to Dad before it melted in the morning sun.

As we got back, Daffodil’s showed up bringing all the block ice they had (all of 2 blocks).  So, back to shore to get more ice; ended up with 4 bags of cube ice from Frangipani.

With everything stowed, we set sail at 11:30 for Mayreau.  We made a bit of a hash of the departure, getting the sails and course a bit wrong initially, but we soon settled down.  Around the headland and a southward course to Mayreau.

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Better night than last; complete with squall around 23:30.  Up around 06:30, nature channel presented a brown booby using our pulpit as a perch for a good ten minutes.  Photos and video obtained, though quality is unknown given the age of the camera.

We have a JPEG from Kenmore Henville of the three of us crossing the Bequia channel; going ashore later today to e-mail it to various people.

Wandered around Bequia looking for a small reel of whipping twine, and a windscoop, but no luck.  Ended up with a small bit of waxed twine for free from a sailmaker, and two cheap bits of rectangular awning canvas (2′ x 2.5′, 22 EC).  Dad also bought some heavy cord to attach the cloth to the boat, and hopefully stitch the cloth.

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Woke up with the sun; got up and chilled out.  Lazed around a bit, then tightened up the starboard lifeline, as it was dangerously slack (and it was something to do).  After observing the state of some of the rope ends, Dad and I have decided to acquire some whipping twine in Bequia, along with a sailmaker’s needle, and we’ll practice our ropework, and tidy up the ropes at the same time.

Ten-thirty rolls around, and Barefoot call on channel 68 - LIAT have found my luggage, and it’s waiting at the airport.  Mum and I go ashore, and rather than catch a taxi (30 EC), we catch a route taxi instead (1 EC/head).  It’s a bit of a tight squeeze, but it gets us there in the same amount of time, and we get some good music on the way.  A quick diversion to the supermarket for some proper ham (to replace the blech bologna), some cinnamon rolls (no longer made) and some fresh milk.  Over to the airport, and after 10 minutes in the wrong line, and 3 minutes in the right room, I have my baggage.  Back over the road, and wait for another route taxi back.

While waiting, we had a chance to watch a slice of island life go by:

• A route taxi with a 50 kg bag of rice, several other large bags and some rather large boxes of frozen meat,
• A dump truck with someone riding in the back - the truck was empty, the guy was standing up,
• A dump truck, fully laden, with someone firing a good sleep on the top of the load, face down.

The ride back was interesting, with a tale of 4 children gone missing in Dominica; all the churches apparently declared the Sunday to be a day of prayer for the children, and on Monday the man who did it turned himself in.  Somewhere in there was a bit about how children these days need to be closer to God, and how the man (or was it the children) had been skinned.  The conversation then moved on to how the woman (telling the tale of the 4 boys) had to pay $1.50 US for 3 green, rock-hard bananas.  Where that came from, I don’t know.

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Sailing holidy not off to an auspicious start - throat is sore, LIAT flight is 2 hours late.  There are 3 other passengers in the terminal, and a handful of staff.  Gorgeous sunny day though; I miss this warmth and humidity.

Good conversations last night at Alka-Hall, and plenty of shite talk.  Unfortunately, I was too tired to join in the D&D session - I hear it ran to 3 AM.  Now need to check Facebook to find a few people like Jason K and Chris C; it’s always good to keep in touch with people.  Amused that Jason works for Sunbeach, where I once worked.

Had a roti for lunch, contemplating getting some frozen skins and taking them home with me.  Have the curry powder already, and I could use the practice.

Tired fuh so; only got 7 hours sleep after 24 hours+ of travelling.  Should sleep well if I get to St. Vincent today.

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Had a report recently that our QA application servers kept falling over (Glassfish that is, not the hardware).    Started looking into it today, couldn’t find a sign of anything wrong.  Then one of the lead developers added a comment about how they’d seen this behaviour when the default Glassfish debug port (9009) gets pinged by our monitoring system.  Then the developer who reported the problem commented ‘oh yeah, we turned that on on Sunday’.

Gotta love trying to work out why something is crashing when no one has said that the configuration has been changed (and the other implementations are perfectly stable).

Note to self: tripwire those machines.

Recently upgraded one of our HP servers to VMware vSphere 4.0, and found that we couldn’t see the hardware status from the vCenter client.  All it would print was “Hardware monitoring service not responding, the host is not powered on”, despite the host certainly being powered on.  A VMware Communities posting suggested that it was either firewall related (nope), or that removing the host and re-adding it might work.  Turns out there was a third option - just disconnect and reconnect the ESX host.

So simple, and now I have full visibility of the fans and temperatures on the host server.