FAQ - What about check-in rules & regs?

We are asked frequently how we know what to do when we check into each new country. The answer is … we don't know until we do a little research. We've discussed the question of check-in procedures before, but it's worth re-visiting. Even if we've checked into a country in the past, we still check to make sure there haven't been any changes. As I'm researching what to see and do in each country, I also check to see what the check-in procedures are. All countries require proof of citizenship (passports) with at least 6 months left before expiration. All countries require boat documentation and clearance papers from your last port. For sure, you'll complete at least one or two forms when you arrive, sometimes many more … in duplicate, triplicate ... sextuplicate even.

“Advance” is the critical word when it comes to learning about check-in procedures since some countries require advance notice of arrival. Australia, New Zealand and Fiji come to mind as countries which require you to notify them officially of your arrival date with associated stiff penalties if you do not comply. Additionally, not every port in every country is a POE (Port of Entry). It's easy to check what the requirements are on-line, download necessary forms and make the appropriate notifications before you leave your last port. Many countries have yacht check-in procedures clearly stated on-line, but Noonsite is an excellent place to start looking for updated check-in procedures.

Customs and Immigration … sometimes in the same location, usually not … are most often first on the list for check-in although some countries like New Zealand and Australia have biosecurity checks right on the quarantine dock before anyone else is allowed aboard and before you're allowed to debark. Customs checks in your boat; Immigration checks on the crew (you!). Then there's Port Authority or the Port Captain and perhaps the Navy (like in Chile) and/or maybe a Health official. If you have pets, even more specific rules apply. Chile, for instance, also requires an e-mail or radio call to the Chilean Armada upon entering their territorial waters and daily thereafter until you reach your point of entry. Hard to know this if you haven't checked out the requirements in advance. Check it out before you go.

Also, things change. Rules and regulations are “fluid”, so it's important to check just before departing your last port. An example of inadequate prep was our recent arrival in Trinidad. We hadn't checked into Trinidad in more than a decade, but I had a fairly recent cruising guide on board and I thought this would suffice. What I didn't realize was that it was necessary to pull up to a specific dock at the Crews Inn Marina for completing all check-in procedures. My bad! Luckily, I was able to email Gentry from the boat. She looked up the procedures for Trinidad on Noonsite, emailed them to me and we complied accordingly.

You can't be expected to know all the rules/regs for every country, but you are expected to learn about them before you go and then follow the rules. Some countries and officials are lax and forgiving; some are not. Some officials are sticklers for detail. The idea of checking-in to a foreign country always seems a bit daunting in the beginning. It's a dragon, of course, (and usually a drag), but once you handle it a couple of times, it just becomes a part of your cruising life … and another story to share.

New House Superstitions

When we began packing for the move to the new house, Mary reminded me that we needed a new broom. A new broom … really? The old one seemed in good shape. Mary assured me you left your old broom at the old house and promptly went out and bought a new broom for the new house. Of all the houses we've moved into over the years, I'd never heard of this tradition/superstition. Being a sailor and having always kept with all our nautical traditions, however, I figured I'd better look into it. I certainly didn't want to piss off any house gods. Sure enough … bringing an old broom into a new house was bad juju … you brought any bad luck you'd experienced (and old house dirt) with it. We rode the new broom to the new house. It worked perfectly.

Interestingly enough, the previous owners had left their old broom behind. I've obviously been living in the dark regarding brooms all these years.

Delving a bit further into new house traditions, I found a few more with which we needed to comply. For instance, don't move on a Friday. Yikes! That would be like leaving on a passage on a Friday. We even moved up the closing date by one day, so we didn't sign the final purchase papers or receive our keys on a Friday. Geez … everyone knows that one!

If we were Wiccas, like my sister for instance, we would have also had a house cleansing and blessing ritual, but we opted for something a bit more simple. Instead, I sprinkled salt on the doorstep when we entered the house for the first time after it was ours. Salt is evidently solid protection against bad luck and keeps the evil spirits out.

A couple other superstitions we didn't feel as strongly about …

• It’s bad luck to carry a hoe into the house. If you do it by mistake, carry it out by walking backwards through the same door — it’ll reverse the bad luck. Hmmm ... we put the hoe in the garage with no thought to bringing it into the house.

• Stuff fennel or an herb with yellow flowers and feathery leaves, into your keyhole or hang it over the door to protect your home from witches. Interestingly enough, Wiccans also suggest this and many of them are self-proclaimed witches. Go figure! Doesn't matter … fennel and yellow-flowered, feathery herbs were in short supply on move-in day.

• Paint your front porch blue to ward off ghosts. They'll think it's water and thus, you'll confuse them. Nah, no blue porches for us. We'll have to chance it.

• Never put shoes on a dresser or table. Now this is reputedly a Jewish tradition which makes sense. It's just not cool to put your shoes on the table … any time.

• According to a Norse superstition, placing an acorn on a windowsill will protect a house from being struck by lightning. This is the desert … no acorns, but we do have lightning. I've got to think about this one.

• Never pound a nail after sunset, or you’ll wake the tree gods. No trees in our yard … only cacti and we reckon the cacti gods might be okay with nail banging. We'll keep the noise to a minimum.

All in all, I think we did okay. I'm feeling like the house has some good energy and the new broom works well.

Taking a Leap - How to use an extra day

Every fourth year or so we pick up an extra day in our calendar and luckily 2016 is one of those years. Leap Day, February 29th, is a welcome addition to our schedule. We need some extra time to get our lives in order before we head back home in a couple weeks to Nine of Cups in Trinidad.

So how come we get all this extra time? According to Rich Exner at cleveland.com, it's a bit more complicated than I thought. “Most everyone knows that leap year is a calendar-balancing act, so our calendars don't get out of whack over time. A year, based on the Earth's orbit, lasts 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds. Put another way, that's 365.2422 days long. A normal calendar year is 365 days. Over four years, that would add up to 1,460 days. But, based on the Earth's orbit, we really have covered nearly 1,461 days. So, Feb. 29 is added in leap years to bring us up to 1,461 calendar days.”

But that's still not exactly precise. “The math-gifted know that four years on the calendar actually last 1,460.9688 days, not 1,461 days. A little difference can add up to a big difference over time. So every 100 years, we don't observe a leap year. There was no leap year in 1800 and no leap year in 1900. What about 2000 ... it was a leap year? Skipping a leap year every 100 years solves much of the problem, but not all of it. So every 400 years, there's another twist. There is a leap day in years ending with 00 if the year is divisible by 400. That made 2000 a leap year and it will be the case again in 2400.

But 2100, 2200 and 2300 will not be leap years. This system will keep us on track for 3,333 years.”

Whew … I was worried.

It was Julius Caesar, by the way, that introduced the first leap every four years. There ended up being too many leap years, so the Romans added an extra month every once in awhile to coincide with the change of the seasons. It stayed that way until 1582 when the Gregorian calendar, the one we use today, was introduced. Some calendars have leap months. The Chinese lunisolar calendar has 13 months every three years. The Ethiopian calendar (yes, there is an Ethiopian calendar) has 13 months

Now that we have the extra day, what are we going to do with it? Aha … I've got that all figured out.

I've scheduled our IRS tax prep that morning, as well as several other irritating little chores while David works on projects at the new house. There's still more moving to be done and stuff to be packed and subsequently unpacked.

Traditionally, if a woman asks a man to marry her on leap day, he must oblige. If not, he must pay a penalty. In some countries, a man who refused would provide the rejected woman with gloves to hide the embarrassment of a missing engagement ring on her finger. Since David obliged me ~30 years ago (actually he asked me...just to set the record straight), I thought I'd turn the tables and invite him out to lunch. MY treat (OUR budget). Since I doubt I'll convince anyone in the family to play leap frog, I thought I'd find a copy of Leap Year to watch in the evening. I know it's a chick flick, but while sipping extra dry champagne on our extra day, David will hardly notice.