Monday 29th January

Boqueron,
Puerto Rico.

18 01.406 N
67 10.638 W

Gerry was up at the crack of dawn whilst I stayed in bed – laying low and keeping out of the way. He managed to reach the impeller without having to take the gen set apart entirely – a bonus for sure! It turned out that the impeller was indeed the culprit of our latest disaster, Gerry says that the glue holding the impeller to the bush had come unstuck, causing the shaft to turn but no water to be pumped and then the impeller drive pin split the impeller. With no water circulating through the engine the temperature rose causing the problem. Happily we have spare impellers so Gerry changed it out and then began the job of reassembling the gen set and the nav station. He also reset the temperature shut down lower, as he considered the original setting to be too high. By 09.15hrs the job was completed, with no cursing (or at least none that I heard) and we could run the gen set again. Gerry encountered one other little problem during the fixing, as many of you know he wears a gold neck chain and as he was leaning in behind the gen set he forgot to isolate the power supply and the chain hanging down touched across the 2 terminals on the starter and shorted out momentarily, causing a spark and fusing a couple of links on his chain, he was lucky it was no worse than that and his chain now bears the reminder to isolate power supplies!
We had arranged for a driver to take us into Mayaguez so that we could clear in with customs and immigration today. The driver had told us to leave it until after midday as there was a ferry/ cruise ship docking in the morning and they would keep the immigration office busy for most of the morning. At just after midday we met up with the driver and along with our friend Jim plus a family off of a boat that had just turned up an hour or so before we piled into the taxi van and were driven into Mayaguez and dropped at the US immigration office there. We filled out forms handed over passports and boat documents and $19 and in return received a cruising permit – we were now legally in Puerto Rico. One thing struck us funny about it though, we were asked if we had any trash on board, we truthfully said that we had a little only to be told that we could not bring it ashore to dispose of it. We wonder what we should do with the packaging, bottles and cans that we have actually bought in Puerto Rico – surely that qualifies as their own trash? Anyway we smiled and nodded our agreement and climbed back into the taxi van. Our next stop was THE mall, apparently the only one in Mayaguez, it was very American with a Sears, JCPenny, Walmart and a few other stores that we know and love! We had 2 hours there – long enough to eat lunch, browse a bit and do some grocery shopping, to be honest we could have spent a bit longer as there were things I would have liked to buy but we didn’t have time – much to Gerry’s relief! We were back in the taxi van all too soon and by 16.30hrs we were back in Boqueron, loading our purchases into our dinghies. We went straight out to our boat and prepared it for an early morning departure as the weather looked good for a trip along the coast and both Jim and ourselves planned to take the opportunity to leave.