The morning started with my extracting the two folding bicycles from their storage and preparing them as they had never been used nor unwrapped before. In doing so I thought it would be a good idea to oil the moving parts to keep them working well and stave off the effects of salt in the air.
Somehow, towards the end of the exercise my 3-in-1 oil vanished. I could not find it anywhere. By deduction I could only surmise I put it down somewhere where it fell over and went over the edge. I hadn’t heard a bump or a splash but it was the only thing I could think of. Of course I went in to look but I found nothing bar the picked clean tuna skeleton from previously.
I eventually got the bikes sorted and after breakfast we dinghied ashore with them. The road to the south looked flat so we decided to ride to the south of the island where our printed out map suggested there was a nature trail. Reading the map was another thing. We managed one or two wrong turns, all the more painful due to the fact that the road south was not so flat after all. Most of the uphill sections required us to get off and push.
We eventually reached the ‘nature trail’ o
nly to find out it was more of a greened over landfill. We decided not to walk the trail but to explore the area and nearby beach/rocks. We found an interesting blow hole where the waves would rush along a crack in the rocks, be forced up and back over at the end of the tunnel forcing air and spray up out of a hole in the rocks. Crabs of all sizes would climb in an out of this hole as we watched.
Riding back to the boat took a lot less time as we made no detours.
Back on the boat we had lunch – this time left over curry from Friday. Normally this is our Saturday lunch but the tuna took it’s place. After lunch I did some troubleshooting on a voltage drop on our 12V circuit. The read out on our console was now 0.6V lower than that at the batteries. This meant we had some annoying losses but more importantly we’ve recently had two false alarms in the middle of the night of batteries being too low. With some help from another 420 owner I traced the majority of the loss to contamination on the breakers which was easily, if only temporarily, rectified by turning them off and on a few times.
In the afternoon I decided to have one more look for the lost oil in the water. I still didn’t find it but did see a number of interesting sea creatures. I even saw a sandy colored ray sitting almost completely camouflaged on the sea bed. I dove down and waved water at it hoping to make to swim off. It stayed put and I wondered if it was dead so I touched it’s edge. This is when I discovered there are such things as electric rays. Ouch.
In the evening we went for a drink at Basil’s where they had a live band. It was a couple – an electric piano player who looked like Fidel Castro and a saxophonist. The atmosphere was pleasant but we saw no locals (celebs) as far as we could tell.
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