A Tale of Two Chemists: Island Time

Sunday 3^rd December 2017

When Rod, Dave and Brian headed home and I still had three weeks to wait for Gloria to arrive I was seriously concerned about what I would do to keep myself busy. Two of those weeks have already passed and I have found myself drifting into “Island Time”. I started with great ambitions to do volunteer work to help the recovery, but that never materialized. I have continued to spend a fair bit of time taking and editing photos and it has also been a good social time with friends that I have made through the rally. Many of the boats have stayed in the area and return to Nanny Cay to re-provision. A number of people are flying home and are leaving their boats at the marina, either on a dock or hauled out on land, so I’ve had the chance to meet them as they pass through. At this point I try and make sure that I get at least one useful activity completed each day, but I’ve learned to relax and enjoy just hanging out.

Yesterday was a fairly typical day. I spent some time with Tom and Marge on “Belize Magique” helping them put up an asymmetric spinnaker with furling that they were considering buying off another boat in the marina. After that I dropped the radar pole on Cotinga and successfully replaced the radar dome. FedEx had delivered it to the marina on Friday, just four days after I placed the order, which I thought was pretty good. Switching out the units simply involved unplugging and unbolting the original and replacing with the new one. I did put a layer of electrical tape around the gasket to try and avoid yet another flooded dome in the future. The only issue that came up was setting up the radar overlay on the chart which required some fiddling with the settings in order to get the chart-plotter find the new radar input, but that's all sorted now. I skipped lunch and by late afternoon I was hungry! Then a fishing charter boat came into the dock loaded with TEN wahoo and a mahimahi that they had caught that morning. There must have been more than 200lb of fish. I have always wanted to catch a wahoo – they are supposed to be great eating and I was delighted able to buy two pounds of wahoo fillets direct from the boat. I split these into three portions, put two in the freezer and sautéed the third in butter with a little garlic and finished with lemon, and ate it with zucchini and elbows with pesto. It was awesome! However, whilst sitting in the cockpit eating my meal and drinking a glass of cold white wine, I realized that the clouds were looking spectacular as the sun set. So I had to take a quick interlude to shoot some pictures. It's tough when two priorities (food and photography) collide, but it did make me realize I have not been taking any food photos! The evening was spent watching “Under the Tuscan Sun", a DVD I borrowed off Tom and Marge. All in all, it was a very enjoyable day.