The day started off quite early, since we had to return the car around 8AM. I had to negotiate some very narrow roads around Portsmouth since the main drag was closed due to the Saturday market but I managed to get to the gas station and fuel up the van prior to returning it; but the car rental place gates remained steadfastly closed when I wanted to enter. Stephen from Katzenellenbogen joined me in the lengthy wait, as he’d dinghied over to pick me up. The office opened at 9AM (well, I should have known about “Island Time” by now, particularly on a Saturday morning!) and we returned the car.
Since we are planning on departing soon, I borrowed some diesel canisters from Stephen and proceeded to do 2 sets of fills (80l each time) and unfortunately managed to make a mess during the last fill and the last canister (a gust of wind at an inopportune moment and a slight slip of the wrist caused what felt like a major oil spill but was only a slight leak). While Katz got their dive gear and went diving off the headland I remained aboard Zanshin and worked on containing the damage and trying to make sure that the teak wouldn’t take on too much colour. Although I’d wetted the teak before starting, by the time I was doing the last pour the teak had already dried a bit and soaked up that nasty diesel stuff!
After my boat was clean enough to be removed from the list of Superfund sites I headed off to Rocking B to download some of their movies to my disk drive and that short visit turned into a longer one which only ended around sunset. As Margaret and Ken are moving on to Martinique while we are heading back up towards Antigua for the Sailing Week we said our goodbyes this evening. Stephen came over for drinking water, as the water they’d taken on here in Dominica was sandy and not tasty; he filled up over 100 litres and as I’m writing this I’ve got the generator running to fill up the battery bank as well as to fill up the water tank.
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