Location: 4° 20.85 S, 55° 49.6 E
Saturday, 12.09.2006

The Schooner Maggie B will hopefully be docked at La Passe, La Digue Island, the Seychelles for Saturday night, at coordinates 4° 20.8S 55° 49.6E. We are about five miles away as I write this. The plan is to tie the bow to the mole and the stern to a tree ashore. We’ll see. We have a Seychelles Island yacht guide translated very imperfectly from the French, so we never quite know what to expect.

It is Finished

One of our least favorite new Seychellois shopping expressions is “It is Finished.” It means Out-of-stock. But butter? “Yogurt, it is finished.” Heard way too often. Then, when something comes in, there is a feeding frenzy.

It’s no picnic!

Those who have been following us may think that much of our life is like last Sunday’s delightful picnic. They should have seen us working in the boat yard this last week. The Maggie B was hauled last Wednesday, to check the shaft and prop, and to clean the bottom and repaint with anti-fouling. The prop and shaft check went fine and minor adjustments seem to have fixed everything. The bottom was something else.

We were covered with barnacles, white hard wormy formations, and green weed. A real mess. Paint scrapers peeled off most stuff, and that was followed with a high-pressure wash, followed by scrapers, followed by sanding. End to end and every inch. She really seemed like a HUGE boat. Working overhead meant barnacles in the hair and every nook and cranny of clothing, working low meant being in the mud and slime of the shipway, bumping into metal scraps or huge timbers. Staging was rickety (I fell six feet when a board broke, happily not breaking anything else), ladders were chancy and the yard was incredibly filthy. I suggested to the owner that he perhaps was waiting for the next tsunami to clear it out like the Augean Stables. We were staying in a little old-fashioned 2 room hotel down the beach a ways, but we were too tired at the end of the day to do anything other than flop in the water and then shower, have dinner and sleep 12 hours, with Iboprofin for tired muscles. Even noisy C.

Clean and slippery!

But now we are all clean and the Maggie B is slippery again and ready for a fast trip to Australia. We are just arriving at La Digue is a little rain storm, that has a tiny rainbow wrapped tight around the boat. Tonight should be fun as Bori has worked out a rendezvous with the “rally” of young French from the Embassy, who are over here for the weekend.

All is well.