That’s a lot of ink

So while the rest of Ontario is seemingly enjoying sunny and dry weather, we here in the southern part are experiencing a lot of the liquid variety. So before I get into much of ho-hum because there is nothing we can do about the weather, we did something we wanted to do for a long time. We printed out our “Diesel Duck” website on our Epson inkjet printer by using tons of ink, purchased discounted at Amazon, shipped in by UPS. Yep, we printed all of it, combined in two 2” binders reflecting 532 pages of memories stuffed into Avery sheet protectors (clear pouches), per two pages each. If you want you can read the stories by clicking the picture of the “Diesel Duck” on the right side bar.

You see before we started cruising with "Diesel Duck" and the now printed out cruising blog, we had an actual website documenting our building of the "Diesel Duck" boat. This webpage had evaporated into thin air over the years. Just recently Benno found an archived link to our (then paid for and maintained website) that we had while building our trawler “Diesel Duck” and we thought we had lost this webpage forever in internet heaven (or hell), when we had stopped posting close to the building finish in 2004. (You can click the link on the right menu bar “Internet Archive Wayback Machine”), but to our dismay many pictures do not come up anymore of this webpage! It is not certain that all our blog posts are around forever and perhaps there is some info you’d like to keep. This is why we had the urge to print our "Diesel Duck" travel blog out before it gets also lost with all the ongoing internet troubles these days. Of course you could put the contents of it on a memory stick, but if you have a printed version like a book to flip through, it is a lot more fun.

Diesel Duck under anchor at Isla Los Roques, Venezuela

Reading through some of our adventures and looking at places we visited brings back so many memories. Here are a few pics from that time.

After hours of snorkelling

Under anchor off Martinique

In the jungle of the Rio Orinoco, South America

San Blas Islands, Panama

Tranquility in the San Blas Islands, Panama

Local Internet cafe at the Kuna Indians, Panama

Trading with the Kuna Indians

Sweet Embera Indian girl trading at the Colombia border, Pacific

Somewhere in Patagonia, Chile

Rowing a mooring line to shore in Patagonia

cannot use the outboard motor because of kelp in the water

tied up with lines to shore at the Glaciers, Patagonia

no villages for thousands of miles around

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Exploring in Uruguay

Meanwhile our hummingbird feeder out next to our deck has been getting a lot of visitors. Rain or not, the little fellas are hungry. There is a male (I think) of the read throated Hummingbirds hanging out on a Rose of Sharon branch above four red Gerbera flowers for days now. He is hunkered there through the pouring rain flying back and forth to the feeder and back to his branch. Not even the dogs, when out on the deck, will discourage him from feeding. We don’t mind him being there and quite enjoy his presence. Occasionally we even see a pair of Hummingbirds flirting around the feeder and I wonder if I am going to see a nest of theirs somewhere in the area, but considering that it would be hard to spot, I’d be very lucky to find it.

For three nights in a row that feeder had been raided by something as I have found it totally empty in the morning and one of its yellow plastic bulbs lying on the ground. Yesterday night I took the feeder inside and this morning we woke up to a bang on the glass sliding door, probably from a bird. Was it telling us that it was time to hang out the feeder, I was wondering? Occasionally there are Orioles drinking from the Hummingbird feeder too, but they clamber around to get to the liquid and I doubt that they were so aggressive to remove the bulb.  Who knows, but I’ll keep an eye on it.