Thursday, 21st October 2010 (The Year of the Tiger)
06.00hrs Aileen vanished off to Mass again. She has a long list of of friends, and their children and grandchildren to pray for, not to mind our own and add the mothers as well. Aileen's Mother is 90 and skippers mother is 94, and mothers sister Edie is 91. God bless them all!
08.00 ABC cars turned up to collect the rent a car, we got good use out of it during the week, but unfortunately never got to do the golf, because of skippers kidney thing, speaking of which, is doing well but still peeing some blinking blood, and that makes it all very uncomfortable. Ohhhhhh... ohhhhhhh, but it will eventually get there.
Later, Terry cleaned up the rib and put back the fuel tanks, plus doing other cleaning bits down at the rear end of the boat. Later still, Terry and Colette wandered off down town just soaking up the atmosphere of this magic Island, Aileen got up on her non existent bike and took off checking out the shops again. It is wonderful to see how women can keep going around the shops day in and day out and never get bored. It has to be a special gene handed down from mothers to daughters, and missed men completely.
Meanwhile, skipper is left holding the fort back on A Lady doing the blinkin blog, reading and catching up on all the emails, actually we had lot of mails recently from the usuals and in particular from the occasionals, including Brid & Micheal Dwan from Ganworth, Gillian and Fergus O'Connell, Ian Mc Millan, N.I., Marion Muench, Germany, Anne(Aileens sister in Sweden), Siun, our sailing friend from Liberty (in Fiji), Fergus Quinlan & Kay from Pylades (who are still in Fiji Soggy Suva), skipper's sister Helen, daughters Sarah and Leah, and son Stefan. It is great to get all the emails, well done and keep it up.
Neil took the small diving bottle down to Wild Tigris and had it filled with oxygen, as they have their own air compressor on board. This saved a lot of time looking for a diving center to do the same job.
14.30hrs Aileen dragged skipper down town for a break (actually as the paymaster general) and in hind sight it was good. The value here is excellent, and we bought some designer shoes for a quarter of the price at home. Further along the road, we got some more shoes, this time the cost was about 10 euros each, here skipper found sailing sandals exactly the same as he was wearing and had purchased in Ireland for 200 euros+ and here they were just 7 euros, but obviously not the same make, but in all other respects, exactly the same. Unfortunately, they did not have the right size...
Later we wandered around to the market, an amazing food market and full of fresh veg of every description, plus a fantastic variety of spices, then we managed to find pineapple in tins, we need this for cooking and found it difficult to get, no problem with fresh pineapple, its everywhere except it goes off quickly enough. On our way back to the boat, we collected a bag of ice for the freezer (really for the G&T's)!
When we arrived back to the boat, Terry and Collette were all dolled up and waiting for our return to head over to the outer dock for tonight's party, being hosted by Caudan Marina. We got ready quickly and all walked the short distance to the gathering of all the boats. Here there were 3 or 4 tents, all located in a special designated area for the party , plus all the food tables, drinks tables, bands, and dancing girls, plus all the usual dignitaries, led by Paul, Andrew and Suzana from World ARC.
The dancing was outstanding by these young beautiful girls, and raises the question of our friend Ian from Belfast, who asked us, why the Blog never has any mention of sex.............hmmmmmmm, hmmmmm, why indeed. Obviously we are afraid of the consequences of doing just that! If our yacht club is prepared to disconnect us from their web site over flowery language, can you imagine what would happen over the mention sex! Yeah sex, that thing that makes the world go around and yet its all Hush, Hush, and you can't discuss it, it might offend.
Now, this brings us back to the dancing. These beautiful creatures in fantastic colourful skirts dancing gracefully and moving their bottoms slowly around in circles in a very suggestive fashion made every Boy and Man in the place green and it was obvious from looking at their faces what they were thinking... Yeah, yeah, and the end result would be a big broad smile on their faces.Ohhhhh, just fantastic.
Now, as the evening wore on, and we mingled with the crowd, the drink was flowing freely, mostly local Rum and coke. We heard words we never heard before, like "they are buckled" or "they have loopy lips", but one thing is certain, there will be sick heads tomorrow. Chessy was tied up to the marina just at the party place, so in their usual generous fashion, invited most of the crowd onto their boat towards the end of the night, making sure that the party would go on all night.
During the night we spent a good while talking to our N.B.F's Philippe and Ingrid, who hosted the party, which was organised by the WARC. Now World ARC have organised some great parties over the last 8 months, but this took the biscuit, well done Paul and Suzana!
At the end of the night, Terry managed to do his special T.B.D. (the middle letter stands for belly, guess the rest). All in all, we had a great night. Late, we staggered back to the boat and helped each other down the steps and into the
scratchers. Can't remember if we had a night cap or not!
That's all for today. Who said anything about sex?
Signed :- Stephen Hyde (Skipper)