As I had the VHF turned on a tuned to CH16 during the night and there was a surprising amount of traffic on it, I didn’t sleep as well, or as long, as I would have wished to. There was some powerboat who started hailing the Port Louis Marina at 06:30 – not realizing that nobody would be on the docks until 8 or 9 but since he was using high-power half the island heard him. Thus woken up, I had some coffee and then dinghied over to “Antinea” with my camera to take pictures of the damage and P-strut (those pictures were posted with yesterday’s blog). Subsequently the two aboard, Welwyn and Friedemann, came aboard for coffee and brought some pastries and I discovered that their replacement boat was going to come before or around noon and the injured boat would get hauled out for repairs.
Since my dive gear was still set up, I decided to attack the bottom-cleaning chore with my two trusty tools, the king-size scraper from a French hardware store and a green Scotch pad used for cleaning pots. The day perfect for it, with no wind or current to move the boat around and making sticking close to the hull difficult and with clear waters to make it easier for me to see where barnacles needed scraping or where green algae growth needed removal (the latter was practically on the whole underwater surface of the boat…).
I went ashore to get bread, but of course the bakery was closed at 15:00 but I did manage to get a case of my favorite water – San Pellegrino and return to the boat with it. Earlier I’d seen another boat of similar size arrive at Antinea’s location and later a sailboat sailed away under main, so I assumed that the switch had been effected but since they were still there I dinghied over and they told me they’d revised their plans to go to Anguilla that day and we agreed to meet aboard Zanshin to help me get rid of the bottle of bubbly taking up space in my fridge and then go have dinner ashore.
Choosing a restaurant in Grand Case is rather difficult, as there are so many good ones to choose from! We ended up at what used to the “The Fish Pot” and is now called “Ocean 82” for an excellent dinner, they had mussel and monkfish meals and I had their 36-hour braised lamb. Subsequently we heard a bit of live music at Calmos Café but the air was thick with cigarette smoke and that drove us out in short order and we returned to our respective boats for a quiet windless and waveless night.
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