The Maple Game

The Burnetts still don’t have any cool pics for you.  Sorry.  While a photograph can convey well the appearance of a vast landscape, it falls short at depicting the broad social landscape that the Burnetts are currently exploring.  While we said a sad goodbye to our friends on SV Maple the other day, shortly thereafter the American crew of SV Counting Stars arrived at Sainte-Anne, adding more kids into the mix that already included us and the Canadians of SV Element.  We all played what Mel has dubbed, “The Maple Game.”  It’s similar to the fabled “Kevin Bacon Game,” popular in Mel’s generation.  This is a game where you try to connect different boats by social networks that all lead back to the gregarious Darryl and Janet of Maple.  It turns out that we were all linked to Maple by only one degree of separation, since Maple pretty much coordinated our meetup.  But Mel would be fascinated to find out how many boats in the Med and Caribbean who have never met Maple can play “The Maple Game.”

With all of these kids boats about, this means that we have not two but – shock! – THREE kids aged 12-13 at the same place.  This sort of conjunction occurs so rarely in the cruising world that we have had to take advantage of it and stay one more day than planned.  We’ve heard the pounding of feet on our topsides as 7 kids hurtle themselves off our deck, and we’ve had to run the generator to keep the Minecraft server going, as it’s been cloudy here! 

The extra time has allowed Greg to work on resurrecting our broken Dometic fridge after the Dometic dealer in Le Marin said there was nothing he could do.  So now Greg is performing a miracle of American ingenuity akin to the rescue of Apollo 13, apparently, by removing corrosion and doing a little rewiring.  Meanwhile, Mel was able to work on some projects of her own.  Like the “clean up the owner’s hull” project.  Previous unsuccessful attempts to clean up the hull went like this:

Mel: “Greg, could you organize the desk in our hull and put some of that stuff away?”

Greg: “No.  I need all of that stuff out for my projects.”

Mel: “Well, could I organize for you?”

Greg: ”Are you mad, woman?  I would never be able to find anything!”

Mel: ”Fine.  I will pretend it is not there.”

As expected, this didn’t work out so well.  So Mel is happy to report: problem solved!  Put this on your list of helpful “boat hacks,” folks:

Before:

After:

Here are a few more pics:

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