This morning Mary Margaret cooked up a big pot of chili that will sit overnight to before it reaches perfection. Once again she used her ¼ acre pot. This is a very well insulated pot where you put the dish that you have cooked up on the stove into once it reaches the simmering stage. The dish then stays hot overnight and all of the flavors rise to their peak intensity as everything slowly cooks. She makes all of her spaghetti sauces, chilies, and stews this way. Ohhhhh, and they turn out soooo good. The hardest part for me, as the Leu Cat's official taster, is that I have to wait until the next day before I can give the dish the official Leu Cat stamp of approval.

While Mary Margaret was slicing and dicing and cooking her heart out, I was topside working to replace a sail batten. On the passage over here from Praslin we had noticed that the top most batten was failing. Instead of holding the top of the sail in a nice, clean arc, it was more "S" shaped.

When I removed the batten, I saw that it was shattered in the center with long, sharp, ugly looking splinters slicing away from the core of the batten. It was still in one piece which was fortunate but no longer had the strength that was required to shape the sail properly.

My guess is that the batten shattered on the passage from Chagos and with the beating into the waves that we did yesterday coming from Praslin, it finally failed. The battens I am using now are not really proper high strength battens. They are just fiberglass poles that I was able to buy when we were in Australia. My batten cars that run up the mast require round battens to fit into them. They only make and sell the flatter battens in Australia and using the Internet I could not find anyone in that country who offered round battens. Thus, the fiberglass poles that I am using are more susceptible to shattering when the sail flogs against the shrouds. Fortunately, I am carrying onboard Leu Cat three spare poles plus I am using two full length poles in our sail cover and in a pinch, I can use them in our mainsail, also. Each pole is about 25 feet long. The top batten is only about 8 foot long so I had to cut one of the poles to length.

By the time we both were done it was noon so we decided to hop in the dinghy and go ashore. We were anxious to walk into town and go to the ISPC supermarket to resupply with fresh vegetable. The store is a little bit inland so armed with our shopping bags, we hooved it up the road from where we landed. It was a nice little walk to get there, especially with a short detour we took when we followed some signage pointing the way to a bakery. Visions of fresh baguettes were dancing in front of our eyes and with our mouths watering; we blindly followed the signs up a long, narrow road. By the time we arrived at the "bakery" we were hot and sweaty since we were not getting the nice wind on shore that we get on the boat. The "bakery" turned out to be a private residence and the bakery portion was closed and looked like it had been closed for some time. Darn! Hot, tired and hungry, we made our way back to the main road and continued our quest for ISPC.

In no time we spied the supermarket and went in. Surrounded by all kinds of goodies and quality foods it was hard to be selective. However, since we knew we had to schlep all this stuff a ways back to our dinghy, we ended up only filling five shopping bags.

The walk back seemed a bit longer since we were weighted down by all of the groceries we had bought. However, eventually, the beach and the dinghy came into view. Now we faced the challenge of fighting our way through the breakers that were bigger now than when we landed.

We timed our entry pretty well and made our way through the breakers with just one wave splashing us a bit. I got the "thumbs up" approval from Mary Margaret which was a relief. In no time we had returned to Leu Cat and home.