Turtle Bay ++

Date: 3/13/2009
Location: Turtle Bay
Lat/Lon: 27 41.210 N 114 53.236 W
Weather: Windy, overcast

Worked on water maker leaks with good success. We did not run the water maker because we are not sure of the quality of the water in the bay and we did not want to clog up the filters unnecessarily. We have enough water to wait to run the water maker until our next trip off shore.

In the afternoon we called the water taxi and went into town. You call the water taxi on the VHF channel 16 and he comes out in a panga, a large row boat with a powerful outboard motor, and takes you to the pier where there are stairs treads leading down to the water with one ladder type step at the bottom. At lower tides the bottom stair tread is 3' above the water level and the bottom step is well above the water. It's navigatable but it takes some courage and just closing your eyes and moving forward.

Once we were off the pier we walked down the beach 50', the only path available, and up onto a small dirt road that leads directly into town. The town has a few blocks of paved road but all the rest is dirt. All of the dirt roads are one lane plus some parking on either side. As one person on another boat put it 'the town is at the end of a 50 mile dirt road that leads to a gravel road'. This place is at the end of the road and the poverty is extreme here. The people are very friendly and helpful and the nicest looking building in town is the church. There are many little grocery stores, more like mini mini-marts with a few can goods, rice, beans, beer, and coke. There are 2 or 3 internet cafés that have multiple computers connected to the internet and you can take your own laptop and connect to their network. We're going back into town tomorrow to buy some beer and a few less important items.

I think I have my laptop problems figured out. The small panel on the top of the keyboard that has the On/Off switch, volume controls, and various lights to indicate if the power is on or hard drive is turning has a plug at one end that plugs into a a receptacle on the main board. The problem is that this plug is not going into the receptacle far enough to make contact so I put a small folded piece of tape under the plug and that seems to help. It still needs a small push from a well placed finger to work every time but at least I know where the problem is and how to fix it.

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