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Charm - Marquesas - Day 7



The banana bread is gone. The bread, the moment, all of it. The adventure is back in the form of a squall that won’t leave.

The day was great. The waves finally calmed enough that we could go on the foredeck and do our PE activities. Cobin and I resumed our boat volleyball. He complained about the unstable footing and risk of falling through the trampoline. I tried to convince him that playing on a trampoline with rolling waves was good for his balance and would make him a better player. But it turns out that kids don’t care that much about their future selves. We had a medium amount of fun anyway.

Sunil and John are good sports and are cooperating with my “experiment” to prove to the kids that if they do something for 5-10 minutes a day, they will improve. So we are all learning to floss (the dance kind, not the oral hygiene kind although maybe we should also work on that). Sunil and John have made great strides in the past two days. I fully anticipate a performance in the near future.

After dinner and a practice poker game (John and Sunil have never played so we will remedy that soon), the kids went to bed and I was doing my 9 pm - 12 am watch. Marin came up to look around and told me that she had to tell me something she had been meaning to tell me.

Marin’s news was that at night, she could only see black in the sky in the space between her eyes. I looked where she was looking and also saw only black on the horizon. Of course, it was dark and everything was black but his area was definitely blacker. I listened to her explain all the facets of this syndrome for a while and watched as she shook her head like a dog with something in its ears (maybe she was trying to shake out the black spot?) and then she finally went off to bed.

I told her she could open all the windows in her room to try to cool it off. Then I felt a few sprinkles. I looked at the sky and noticed the black spot of Marin as well as several more. I tried to remember if squalls came from the port or starboard and if it was the same or opposite below the equator but no clear knowledge was forthcoming. I didn’t feel like turning on the radar because it never showed anything interesting when I thought squalls were imminent.

When the sprinkles became more vigorous, I decided to shut the windows in Marin and Tully’s room. When the rain came in earnest, I grabbed Joe’s raincoat (mine was hanging uselessly in the closet) and let the sails out and tried to pick a point of sail that seemed the least problematic. I fiddled around with some sail trimming and got utterly soaked on the bottom half (was wearing a non-waterproof skirt) so I removed the drenched skirt and remained outside in Joe’s jacket and my underpants.

Joe eventually woke up and observed that I was drenched and let me continue to trim the sails and wait out the squall. There wasn’t much else to do and it was my watch and I was wearing his jacket.

After a couple of hours of this, John came up to start his shift. John is a lovely Scottish gentleman and, while Joe’s jacket is quite long, it wasn’t long enough to conceal my lack of appropriate clothing. There wasn’t much I was going to do about it but I did ask John if he had any waterproof pants. He had come up in his raincoat and shorts but that hadn’t worked out so well for me.

He gave me an odd look but then went down and came back up with a full rain suit on.

It was only later, wrapped in a towel and dry shirt that I remembered that the UK folks use “pants” for men’s underwear. What we call pants, they call trousers.

I’m sure John was thinking, “No, I haven’t got waterproof pants but I can see you don’t either!”

Off to sleep and let John enjoy the squall that we can’t escape! It has now reformed once again with even more redness extending around us. At least the winds aren’t bad - it’s just wet.

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