A frontal system had passed through during the night, I woke up around 1AM to winds gusting and an arrhythmic thumping sound forward, which turned out to be my anchor ball which had worked its way loose. I rolled it up and stowed it since it wasn’t any use at night. I checked the anchorage and my boat didn’t seem to be moving, and no other boat was visibly dragging so I went back below to sleep.
While making my morning coffee and just before selecting and editing the pictures of the previous day, I realized that my bottle of milk had tipped over and that the contents had emptied to the bottom of the fridge, and of course the milk was all the way up top, dripping onto the two baskets and their contents before draining overboard. Thus my maintenance priorities quickly changed from cleaning the hull to defrosting and cleaning the fridge. I put those items most susceptible to warmth in the pre-chilled freezer compartment and then let the fridge thaw out – it was way past time to do so as the whole ice compartment was full of ice and I’m sure that the fridge wasn’t working at anywhere near capacity. Luckily the ambient temperature was working in my favor and the thawing process went quickly while I edited the pictures for yesterday’s blog and chatted a bit on the internet in a sailing forum just to tease the mainly American participants who were still in the ice age and eagerly awaiting spring. On a very positive note, I found that steak I’d been missing, tucked between the freezer and the tray beneath it. The steak was only one month past expiry-date but fortunately the Saran-wrapped Styrofoam tray had kept it from leaking into the fridge. I hope some fish or at least a colony of bacteria have a good meal from it.
Alexis dropped by to tell me of the Sunday night BBQ on the beach and sold me a ticket; although I know I won’t be eating much the proceeds go to the PAYS organization so that is in a good cause. Lunch wasn’t too tasty as the bread I’d bought the day before wasn’t good anymore, if it ever had been, but I think it might make a good base for garlic bread and butter when I fire up my grill sometime later this week.
I spent the afternoon doing another round of cleaning scum off the boat waterline and then worked with my Prism Polish to remove some of the rust on the forward stainless. I showered and changed in preparation for the 19:00 BBQ ashore hosted by PAYS and watched the sun head towards the cloudless horizon. I thought I’d done a good job going cold-turkey for my serious medical case of sunset-photographitis but this sunset was just too much temptation for me to be able to withstand.
In retrospect it was a good thing to succumb, as I believe I not only saw the green flash but got a picture of it. Just as with UFO and Sasquatch pictures, it is a bit fuzzy and needs a bit of explanation, but the picture has definite green pixels in it, the next one had a lot of green but had too much noise to post.
Dinner ashore was surprisingly well-visited. I sat at a table with some French cruisers who spoke little English, so I ended up trying to speak French all night and I got better as the night progressed (first rum punch, then a local beer and some Carib) despite the impression that they didn’t understand a word I was saying… their French must have been worse than mine.
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