We headed out for Roche Harbor this morning after Melissa’s 90-minute meeting with Mexican administrative staff to plan the transition. Dave wants to be there for the 4th of July fireworks. When we reached Roche Harbor, we floated around for an hour waiting for the customs dock. While we floated the guys discovered there is a new on-line check in process. There was a sailboat ahead of us that just seemed to fiddle around on their sailboat for an hour – all the while blocking access to the customs dock. It looked like they just didn’t have their paperwork together. Sigh. Dave hailed them and they said they needed another 20 minutes. That made Dave wonder if there was something different about the process. He asked Jim to look it up and see if there was some new paperwork we needed. Jim noticed there was a new tool called “CBP ROAM™”. You can download the app via the google store and use it to check in. The guys downloaded the app and put in all the required data. Halfway through it dumped him out and he had to start over. Once he got all the way through it, it said “processing”. Customs called Dave she tried to turn on video for an interview. But the video didn’t work on the app. At which point she said, “oh you are NEXUS”, and Dave replied that “only two of the four of us are”. But she cleared us anyway telling us we would get our clearance in email.
Lunch was steak salads because we had a whole left-over rib eye in the fridge. Add some iceberg wedges, feta cheese, mushrooms, and avocado, and yumo!
While we floated at anchor, Melissa decided to sand the upper deck side bar. She worked on it once before (http://seastar7.com/entries/2022/maneuvering-testing) but didn’t get it as smooth as she hoped. Now it looks much better!
For dinner, Jim fixed BBQ chicken using the left-over orange sauce from yesterday, grilled green beans, and roasted sweet potatoes.
After dinner we realize we want a few ingredients for hot dogs and hamburgers tomorrow for the 4th of July. The guys cruise over in the dingy to the little store. As they are getting back in the dingy, they discover a crowd of people who are stranded. Their motor has died, and they rowed back to the dock. They asked for a tow back to their boat. The guys are like, “sure thing”. They kept trying to offer beer in the way of thanks, but the guys said no, they would rather put a deposit in the karma bank. There were 7 people to load into the dingy and two of them were hefty. Dave said one of them should load into our dingy. And then they couldn’t go very fast because the stranded dingy was so overloaded and nearly taking on water. Melissa and Margaret were wondering what was taking so long by the time they got back.
Jim noticed that the forward shower wasn’t draining properly a few days ago. They removed the drain and tried to blow it out with the air compressor, but that didn’t work. So they ran the snake down the drain and that worked but took a while. They also noticed that the bilge was full. They had to turn on override switches to drain the bilge, so we also need to fix the float switches.
Dave developed a strange set of hives on his feet. We gave him Benadryl, which amps him up. Hence why he was all in on working on the shower pump so late at night. We’ve not determined a source of what he is reacting to. Lots of speculation – cedar planks at the spa, the spa water chemicals, his socks, various foods. Remains a mystery.