With the post in place

There are demands from our readership. Well to be strictly accurate a grand total of one person has commented on the lack of blog activity. They are of course absolutely correct. You know who you are….Julian 🙂 Did I write that? I planned to only think it! So this one is for you. Think of it like a Simon Bates love song, but with John Peel overtones. We are after all in the United States of Amnesia.

So here we go, catch up time.

We met someone who appeared to have no connection at all to any banks and dealt only in krugerrand gold coins, selling them occasionally to a dealer to realise cash to buy food for himself and his cat. I was disappointed he didn’t look like Johnnie Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. I’ve never come across anyone like this before. In practical terms I guess this means no electronic trail is left behind unlike when the vast majority of us get cash out of a cashpoint or use a credit or debit card to buy stuff.

Made me think about why you’d choose to live like that. Could be a variety of reasons; you don’t trust the banking system, (fair enough), you don’t like big brother watching, (I found myself being filmed in Walmart buying shower gel this week so I took offence and my trade somewhere else), you want to live under the radar, (that has to be very possible in North Carolina), your default setting is suspicion or maybe you followed a treasure map and dug up a box of coins, negating the need for a bank. Who knows.

My default setting is not suspicious. I like to trust and believe in others, looking for the good that’s out there. Perhaps there’s a naivety to this approach and I will get burned big time one day. I’m also hopefully not that stupid to fail to notice the pure fruit loops, whackos and the odd ‘nutter on the bus’.

Does mean though you’ve got to remember where you hid your secret stash. That may be tricky…for Dave who occasionally seems to dedicate his life to forgetting where things are. Cruel wife. We have not got a stash of Krugerrands.

And brief flurry of boat news. Still here. Still working on jobs. The mast compression post is now back in situ. Peripheral work still needs to happen to finish it off both inside the cabin and on deck. Dave is installing a wash down pump on the foredeck. Be a boon to be able wash down the muddy anchor chain as it comes up or fish detritus when dinner arrives. My job has been the hull. The small holes have been sanded and epoxied and sanded and cleaned, all in preparation for copper coat wash down.