Up until my last blog entry, I was managing to quite regularly write a few lines about my company and life in Antigua, but then as you can see I stopped.
I find that when trying to do anything "creative", I must be relaxed and in a positive mood, and over the past few weeks I haven’t been there. As you would have seen if you had been keeping up with the blog, boat troubles were taking their toll on the company, the crew and on me. After the 15th the problems didn't stop. Although we didn't have to cancel any tours, we did have to use the Xtreme boat a few times to do Eco tours. We also spent long hours after work on several days getting the eco boat ready for the next morning. We left there after midnight one day, and that was after doing a tour that day as well. Tony worked far too many hours over the past month, and I am grateful for the dedication and calmness which he showed when dealing with all the problems. Several eco-tours came back on one engine, and the crew that we have did a great job of making sure everyone was back on time. Actually I think many of the guests didn't even know that we were running on one engine. Our philosophy is "the show must go on" and more important than anything else is the dedication to making sure that our guests have a great time. I think from the reviews I have seen on the various forums that we accomplished this even in these difficult times.
Altogether I have probably had to fork out about US $18,000 in parts and labor and I still have more work to be done. For both boats we keep spare engines, and I have 2 extra ones for Xtreme and one for Arawak Odyssey (the eco boat). All three have been used and abused to get the boats up and running at 100%, so now they have to be fixed back up in order to be on standby for the next round of problems. And that is the thing that anyone in this business has to be prepared for and to accept. Problems on boats are as sure a thing as getting wet when you go snorkeling. Not everyone likes getting wet but you have to accept it and are prepared to deal with it. If you keep on swimming you won't feel the cold brought on by the wetness. "Keep on swimming" wasn’t that from "Finding Nemo"....I love that movie. It’s a prerequisite for my tours you know.
Anyways.......we are in the keep on swimming mode here at Adventure Antigua and there are some exciting new changes that I will mention in the coming days. I am going to have fun with this blog again and hopefully you can too. Since I haven't been posing lately...here are a few pics for ya.
(The first one at the top is of some friends on the front of the eco boat who came with us to give the engines a proper test when we had finally finished all our work last Saturday)
(The one below is of us running the boat hard to make sure she was 100%, and the last one I took while doing the Eco tour on the Xtreme boat. It was the first time I had done the eco tour in ages, and I enjoyed it.)
