4th December

12 00 N

61 46 W

Weather; sunny, wind n/a waves n/a

I did Gerry a bit of a disservice yesterday as I totally forgot that he had done an oil change on the water maker which involved him having to do boat yoga and squash himself into his favourite lazarette in order to reach the filter, after first removing all the oil and "stuff" that he keeps in that particular black hole. I stood by with rubbish bag and kitchen towels as per my usual role when he is doing anything - it makes for less mess and cleaning up at the end of the day! It didn't take too long to complete the job and he emerged from the hole to carry on with the other jobs that I have already talked about as well as up-dating the maintenance log.
Today, being the end of the fortnight, it was time for us to have a hire car for the day and do the running around that gets done on such occasions. First though we had received a message from John Hovan (our delivery guy) that he had finally got a delivery of diet coke and did we want some, which of course we did. We don't know why it is so difficult to get and he sells out on the day that he gets each delivery, I'm certain that he would be able to sell even more of the stuff if it was available. The arrival of said beverage meant that we had to dinghy into the dock to collect it at 9am and bring it out to the boat before making a second trip into the dock to collect our hire car which was being delivered to the dock at 10am. All went to plan, we got our coke and stashed it, took the trash bag ashore - I'm really not sure where some of it comes from but we always have a small bag to dispose of and arrived at the dock at the same time as Dale and Lorie. The four of us waited for a short while in the heat and humidity until the hire car turned up and we gratefully piled in and turned the air conditioner up full blast to cool down. Our first stop for the day was Port Louis Marina as Dale and Lorie needed to have a face to face chat with the marina lady who was dealing with their claim for boat repairs needed due to the power problems that they had whilst docked at that marina. It was sort of a successful chat, they managed to get the replacement parts ordered by the end of the day, but as they will be coming from the moon via both poles it's still going to be a while until they have everything back up and running as normal. From the marina we headed to the most important stop of the day - the bank, as we were out of local currency. Gerry did the bank stuff whilst I went over the road to a small supermarket where I had hoped to find pepper corns, the IGA that we tend to do most of our grocery shopping at hasn't had any on the shelf for the past 4 weeks and we were getting to the desperate point. Luck was on my side so I bought 2 containers to be sure then I spotted the chocolate that Gerry prefers and bought all of it from off the shelf, again it's something that seems to sell out as soon as it appears so you grab what you can when you see it - it will last about a week at the rate he eats it and then he will craving it yet again until it next appears in the shop. We tossed up whether to do the "big" shop next or go for an early lunch at the container park and then do the shopping, the lunch won out and we drove out of our way to the container park being the first ones there for the lunch time offerings which were as good as always. Once lunch was done we headed back in the opposite direction once more and made our way to the IGA. The place was heaving with people and cars everywhere as we made our way into the mall where Gerry needed to check out the computer store for both batteries and a new router - neither of which he bought. Unfortunately we were still about 2 hours earlier than normal arriving at IGA and we found that the restocking of shelves was only just beginning and there was a shortage of just about everything with big empty gaps on many of the shelves. I needed potatoes and there wasn't a single one in sight and the rest of the vegetable offerings were restricted to a few carrots, cucumbers and taro none of which were on my list for the day. Luckily I managed to get all of the tinned goods that we needed along with some meat products, a couple of bottles of essential supply (rum) but not much else - even the butter was in short supply. We still managed to fill the boot of the car with all the bags though, plus Gerry managed to score the tiny batteries that he was after from the store next to IGA so that was a win for the day. Having lost out at the computer store today they had suggested that he try at Island water world for the router that he was chasing, we had nothing else on the agenda so drove back across town once more to IWW where Dale bought some wax and Gerry, once again, didn't find what he wanted. There is another grocery store just down from IWW and having missed out on a vegetable stock up I asked to stop there in the hope of finding something green (not slimy and unidentifiable at the bottom of the fridge Abigail or the stuff you have with lamb Lee!) Luck was on our side there was a small amount of vegetables that met the criteria and I managed to get enough beans, snow peas, broccoli etc. to last out at least the week - longer if I can convince Gerry that we need to eat out a couple of times! We had now completed our shopping for the day and headed back towards Spice Island along with every man and his dog who own or have hired a car, it's hard to imagine a traffic jam on such a small island but believe me when I say it happens! I'm sure that some of the traffic is down to it being POETS day (if you don't know what this is you'll have to email me for the explanation as I can't type it here - its sure to offend someone), there were cars coming out of nowhere as well as busses and taxis - maybe it's all down to it being the silly season!
We made it back to the boat with our stuff and unloaded and stashed it all away, our fridge and freezer are looking more normal now and we won't starve to death. We then relaxed for the next couple of hours before heading back into the dock, meeting up with Dale and Lorie once more and going to the Options container park where we introduced Dale to our curry shack find, we all had a great meal with enough left over for lunch tomorrow, especially as Lorie had us make a detour to the original container park where she bought some rotis to add to her left over curry. We stopped at their apartment for a night cap which made a very nice change from spending the evening by ourselves on the boat before we finally made our way back out into the harbour in time to go straight to bed.
We sadly saw the gut wrenching video of Puerto Rico's Aricebo Observatory Telescope collapse that happened this week, we visited it when we stopped at Puerto Rico on our last trip and were in awe of the place then. If you have ever watched the Bond movie "Golden Eye" you will have seen the radio telescope as it appears in the film. The collapse was videoed by a drone and is out there on the internet for anyone to watch if you need to see it - just type in Aricebo and it will pop up.
So for the advent photo today I present you with the EPIRB, or in our case 2 of them. I'm sure that most of you will know what these are - Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons. These are set off in dire emergencies when our lives are at risk and hopefully the signals they give off will be picked up by various emergency search and rescue centers and they will come out and save us! Most boats carry just one of these which is registered to the country in which the boat is also registered. As our boat was a US documented boat originally we had a US EPIRB - that's the white one, which we had registered with the US authorities. Then when we changed our boat to become an Australian documented boat we bought and registered an Australian EPIRB - the orange one, so that we were well and truly covered for the entire trip home, not that we ever want to have to set either of them off but if the shit hits the fan we will be setting them both off and seeing who responds the fastest. We know, from an experience that Dale and Lorie had, that the first thing that they do when a signal goes up and the rescue center receives it, is they phone the numbers we have supplied to them to find out if it is a genuine call for help or just an accidental setting off. So everyone who's phone number has been given as an emergency contact (you know who you are) needs to take a call from the rescue very seriously - we might be relying on you to give them information to save our lives.