May 12, 2010 – SavuSavu – taking care of business

I had 4 projects on my plate today: finish transferring the seasonal clothing, tidy up the galley from breakfast, walk up to the hospital with Frank to pay the health inspector our fees for coming into their country "disease-free", and to read my new Jonathan Kellerman book.  My plans, however, got changed.  While Frank had been "repairing" the dinghy motor yesterday, he had a little accident spewing oil all over the dinghy.  He had used up the bottle of dishwashing soap to clean it up.  When I went into the floor locker where I store spare kitchen supplies and cookery, I felt something wet.  It tasted salty. Uh-oh.  That is not good.  It is never good.  I began removing its contents.  There was a 2-inch puddle in the bottom of the locker.  Everything had to be cleaned and dried.  The water was sopped up out of the locker, but before I replaced the contents I wanted to know where the water came from.  Frank thinks it happened when he replaced the paddle wheel on our knot speed indicator, so we'll let it go at that and hope for the best.  After we got it all put back together I returned to my list of TTD's.  In the meantime Frank has declared this a reading day and sat down with a non-fiction book called, "Inside Delta Force".  He is having trouble putting it down.  By noon I was finished tidying and stowing so we gathered ourselves together for our trek to the hospital.  It is a 30-minute uphill walk.  Frank wanted to take a cab, but we NEED the exercise after being at sea for over a week.  We stopped to grab a quick lunch at the Captain's Table, and ran into people, turning lunch into a 2 ½ -hour social visit.  At 2:30 we headed to the hospital.  The walk wasn't so bad.  Although the heat is stifling, we found spots of shade along the way and caught a nice breeze every now and again.  We eventually arrived at the hospital, which looked very third world.  While we paid our fees we ran into Dennis and Janet from s/v Shilling.  They were on the same mission, and so during our walk back down to town, the boys decided a beer at the yacht club was in order.  Of course as we sat at the club, other cruisers would trickle by and pull up a chair.  We had gathered quite a large group and were having a gay old time when Janet smacked her head with her palm and said, "Oh crikey! We are supposed to be on Cop Out at 5:30!"  Ken and Wendy had caught a huge, 2.5 meter mahi mahi on the way up and had invited us all over for a pot luck tonight.  We all began mumbling about what we were going to prepare for the side dishes as we made a mad scramble for the dinghies.  We enjoyed a feast on Cop Out, with 4 other couples.  Finally after stuffing ourselves and sharing lots of boat stories we fell into our dinghy exhausted.