Tuesday 27 December 2011, Lizard Island, The Exumas

Last night Ulric left for shore leave with a huge monkey sticking out of his backpack. This is ‘the new Monkey God’: “Flamebo’s Dad”, Quinn’s Christmas present…. (Flamebo is Quinn’s most prominent money. He terrorizes the family on a daily basis…) The Monkey God decided to join Ulric for a beer in The Green Parrot.

From across Nassau Harbour, our mast lightning looks like ‘a tall building or fancy skyscraper’ (to quote Elliott!) My own observation was that our mast points right at Polaris, The Pole Star. However… our posh new lightning is dwarfed completely by the cruiseship just across the water, decked out for Christmas (or Junkanoo?!) in a whole department store worth of fairy lights. I said to Ulric: you just can’t win, can you?!

Some of the conversations on this ship are surreal. Like Ulric saying: ‘Sadly we don’t have the glue to fix Brendan’s poo’ (one of Brendan’s Christmas presents was a plastic joke turd from the Tiger Shop in Lewisham).

It is a funny existence, being thrown together like this in a confined space 24/7. The phrase ‘all hands on deck’ means exactly that: at the fuel pontoon this morning all five of us had a task. The Almqvist family works as a team.

Having said that… as soon as we have tied up or gone for anchor, Brendan climbs down again and says proudly: “I am off duty now!”

As I can’t take an Omen Walk here (at home the school run is my ‘omen walk’ for client work!) I make a spectator sport out of reading boat names to get a fix on the day. The first boat I saw in Nassau this morning was called DOLPHIN ENCOUNTERS and I thought: WOOHOO!

The next boat I saw was called Mairi Read and I thought OH NO! because she was one of the most notorious pirates in the history of the Bahamas. She would dress as a man and seems to have possessed the nine lives of a cat, getting into many scrapes and shoot outs. No pirates on our path today please… maybe we can frighten them off by hoisting our own skull & crossbones flag?!

Today our destination was Lizard Island in the Exumas. We just watched the sun set behind Lizard Island. We will go and meet the lizards on the beach tomorrow morning. Brendan has already reminded us that we need to ASK FOR THEIR PERMISSION before we go ashore. Natural born shaman – that one!

Right now it is 6.15 pm. Darkness has cloaked Lizard island and we are safely for anchor in the horseshoe shaped small bay. Soon I will go on deck to greet the Moon and the stars. Ulric and I spent some time on deck last night with the new binoculars. It was fun zooming in on Uranus and Sirius, but even in Nassau there is a lot of light pollution.

Elliott has started writing a newspaper here on board, by the title of The Weekly Herald. It will report the news and have a comic strip plus the details of Elliott and Brendan’s ‘piano recitals’. It is going to cost about 75p a copy, Elliott is already touting for business. I have told him that Farmor is bound to be a loyal customer!

By Imelda Almqvist