One quickly loses sense of time aboard a boat while cruising around the Caribbean. The first thing that happens is that one tends to forget, or ignore, what day of the week it is. Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn’t lose that keen appreciation of weekdays and I have found myself standing in front of locked store doors on more than one occasion, having forgotten that it is Sunday. This is often the case in the French islands, which not only shut down completely on Sundays but also have extended lunchtime closure hours. Today was Phase II of time loss, I knew it was Monday but had forgotten that it was Easter Monday and those same closures applied as well. Luckily, one small supermarket and the Pelican store, which is the village’s only place to clear in and out, had chosen to open in the late afternoon and I, along with Les, stocked up on groceries and then I cleared out of Guadeloupe with destination Antigua.
I used the cloudy weather and occasional windless moments to go over my topsides in two rounds, the first with a dilute solution of vinegar and the second with Awlwash cleaning compound. I had left it too long between washings and there is going to be more work to do soon since there are what seem to be insoluble salt crystals close to the waterline. I’ll have to use a stronger vinegar solution in the hopes that it will soften and dissolve those deposits.
Both Les and I opted to remove our dinghy engines and store them for the passage across to Antigua, so neither of us left our respective boats in the evening but remained aboard. I watched another movie from the collection I’d copied from Rocking B and had a thawed out small steak cooked on the BBQ with a baked potato and went to sleep around midnight.
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