Arnold on Aruba

While Arnold was on the plane to Aruba on Monday, Mark Rutte announced a strict lockdown for the whole of the Netherlands, and travel abroad was immediately and strongly discouraged. So Arnold really picked his date well!

That same evening we went straight for a taste of the proper Caribbean feeling by having dinner at the Bugaloe, a bar on Palm Beach that sits on a little pier out in the ocean. Surrounded by gigantic high-rise hotels (very practical: the road signs simply say “High rise Hotels”) full of Americans, we got the last table for people without a reservation. A bucket of very small beers on ice, the Aruban way of drinking cold beer in the tropical heat, went down very nicely after a long trip.

The next day Rishi and Pepe fitted the bow roller for the anchor that we had brought along in no time at all, and before noon we were already bobbing at anchor. Lovely weather, and a boat really does belong in the water.

Since I had decided to do a few upgrades to the electronics after all (the VHF from 2005 was on its last legs, and the new GPS compass wasn’t up to scratch), we had to wait for a few parcels and stayed a couple more days at Varadero Aruba. Judith from the yard was a great help, and thanks to her the parcels were piloted through customs in two days or so without having to pay any import duties or tax. Super service! It is incredibly hot here, though, when you have to install all sorts of boxes down below…

It got even better when we heard that Merrimac and Pitou (another Dutch sailing boat here) were invited to the yard’s end-of-year party. This came after we had thanked the staff the Friday before for their excellent service over the past months by putting out a few crates of beer and some snacks and drinking them together.

So yesterday we headed for the reef at Spaans Lagoen, to be plied with snacks and drinks all day long. Everybody laughed because we turned up in the big boat instead of the dinghy, but this way we didn’t have to motor 3 miles back in the dark over unfamiliar water afterwards. Arubans really know how to throw a party, we discovered! Great fun, and my “hands and feet Spanish” now runs to at least 20 words. Sitting in the sea, chair and all, 3 metres from the last coral reef. All quite special and very good company.

In any case I can only recommend Varadero Aruba: they did everything as promised, for a very reasonable price. Materials are expensive and/or hard to come by, a consequence of everything having to be imported in small quantities, which means more shipping costs and taxes. But if you do the antifouling yourself, you’ll spend the same amount on paint anyway. I also see it as a decent way of supporting the island’s economy, which came in very handy this year since there were so few tourists. The boats are hauled out and launched with a Roodberg trailer, very safe. They are very well shored up and, if you like, fitted with storm blocks as well: big one-cubic-metre concrete blocks that hold your boat even more firmly in place. In our case they would do that if bad weather was on the way, but that turned out not to be necessary. The yard manager, Rishi, communicates clearly. We quickly got on well and he took good care of us. He has a good technical understanding himself and was quick to bring in the right people and keep any other work that was needed on track. Lovely, that’s how it should be. Merci Rishi, and thanks also to all the guys who helped out. Good job! The management, the office and the apartment managers are all very helpful and friendly too.

Now we’re at anchor off Talk of the Town to recover, in 2.5 metres of water, off the beach where there are a number of beach clubs. It reminds me a bit of the Côte d’Azur of old: nice clubs and lots of people enjoying the water, from open sailing dinghies to huge fishing boats and speedboats. Here’s a photo taken by Marwin from the yard, who spotted us lying at anchor here.

By the way, of course something else has broken again; that seems to be par for the course. The boom won’t come down any more, a problem with the hydraulics. Luckily the German neighbours on SY Baradal (to our right in the photo above) once again know someone who has a factory here and does a lot of hydraulics work, and they’ll be dropping by shortly to see what they think it is.