Had a fantastic sleep but woke up and it was quite windy and not that nice in the anchorage. We decided to check out and head to the next island, Union Island, which has an Ashton harbour and Village. Now that would be a must we thought!
We went straight to the customs/immigration office which was a tiny little office next to the shipyard. Robbie settled in at the coffee shop next door and ordered coffees and set up the wife while I went into customs. They were busy, so gave me a form to complete so I took it and had my coffee when I had completed it, the office was being cleaned, so we had to wait 45 minutes while the cleaner swept and then washed the floor in the tiny office! Meanwhile the customs officers were just lounging around outside on their telephones! Not a good look at 9.30am!
We sorted the boat and the duck in to the yacht club dinghy dock and then walked the short distance to the airport, where the customs and immigrations are.
Along the way we passed a few paddocks with some goats tied up. One of them had the rope all twisted around its leg and it was crying. Robbie climbed the fence and went to help it. Another yachty was walking past and his comment was “Do a good deed and suffer the consequences” I thought it was a rather negative comment to make actually. We couldn’t bear to see an animal suffer like that. It was quite quick to check in, but the customs officer asked me to buy a raffle ticket for a “reconditioned Toyota car”, which is drawn in April. I said no thanks, I won’t be here in April and I live on a boat. She then quite forcefully said “Well you could support us anyway!”, so I handed over $5 and told her to put it in her name. She put it in her husband’s name…. She was very friendly after that. Now I know what people mean when they say in the Caribbean everyone has their hand out all the time!
We then sat in the yacht club to try and sort out the Coastal Explorer downloading problems, purchase more phone credit online for internet and check emails etc. Well I think the good deed thing was biting us on the arse. We had a great lunch, but spent several very frustrating hours trying to top up our phone credit for data, but in the meantime Robbie was able to get the main MacBook pro navigation computer completely finished. The back up one just won’t play the game. We ordered a small part Robbie needed that Jennifer is kindly going to bring back for us from her visit home to the States
We then get an email from the Lugger parts guy from Hattons in the USA to say our credit card declined, plus an email from skype saying our automatic top up was rejected as the credit card declined. So we have to make another phone call to Australia to our bank and sure enough they didn’t like the $46 dollar transaction for the small part or the skype and they blocked them. The skype goes through once or twice every month and we have told them so many times to please email us if they are going to stop our credit card, but they never do. It is so embarrassing when it happens, and it makes me almost nervous to use it now. I guess it is a good thing they are trying to do but man it always seem to happen when we are having phone or internet issues. It’s never one thing at a time! It turns out, this was also why we couldn’t top up the phone credit.
We had some small fish swimming around in the blue lights again, and in the outer light circle, there were like stingrays gliding around, it was pretty cool.