The full moon had disturbed my sleep and a bit of north swell had also settled in overnight, causing the boat to rock around quite a bit. Those two factors added to the heavy meal and drink last night had me feeling somewhat under the weather in the morning, but a bit of coffee and an aspirin did the trick soon enough. We had originally planned on sailing today, but the seas out there weren’t great for a first sail with people who admitted that they didn’t travel well, so we postponed today’s outing. Instead, Alyssa, Nick, Sascha and I got our snorkeling gear together and headed to Creole Rock to see the sights. The dinghy ride out was wet (no surprise there) and most of the mooring balls were gone but our anchor held and soon we were in the water. This was the first snorkel for both Alyssa and Nick, and it turned out that their masks were not correctly sized and leaked quite a bit so our swim didn’t take us very far. Sascha managed to kick against the bottom of my dinghy and cut himself on the top of his foot. This I take as a signal to get rid of the thick growth of gunk underneath the dinghy as soon as possible. We used some of my recent medical training to clean the cuts (with Hydrogen Peroxide and a gauze) and apply some antiseptic and a temporary bandage – of course Sascha had to get from the dinghy ashore so that nice clean bandage didn’t last too long!
We returned ashore from my boat armed with my paint scraper, a bucket and a pot cleaner and soon had the dinghy apart, turned over and I started scraping away the worst of the offending barnacles and seaweed and other growth. While I let what green scum remained attached to the dinghy dry in the sun I lazed underneath the beach umbrellas and unwound for a while. Once the dinghy was dry enough we put it back together and I returned to the boat in order to do a lot of absolutely nothing for a while. Shortly before sunset the winds died and both Alyssa and Nick got a short lesson in dinghy handling. They were invited to a beach party held by the owners of their rental flat and I returned to the boat for a dinner consisting of my day-old baguette with cheese, roast beef and cold cuts (plus a Presidente beer).
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