Day 152, Year 5: Snorkeling and Provisioning
Date: Saturday, March 27, 2010
Weather: Beautiful Day; No Wind
Location: Gan Island, Addu Atoll, Maldives
We started our day by joining an Equator Village Resort snorkeling trip. There are two bright yellow tourist boats that are moored right beside us and when we walked to the resort to join the snorkeling trip, it was one of those boats that picked us up. We headed to the north side of the atoll to a very nice snorkeling site. It was a wide reef top with lots of stony coral, especially table corals. We saw a nice array of fish, a beautiful eel, and a very shy octopus. We were glad that we went.
Once we returned it was time to turn our attention to the details of getting ready to leave. Getting our propane cooking gas tank filled was a number one priority. Our agent, Mas-ood, arranged for someone to pick up the tank and get it filled. It was returned last night and was not even half full. It was explained to us that they only way they can fill our tank here is the drip method. This means hanging one full tank above our empty, connecting the tanks with tubing, and then letting gravity do its thing. Well, the professionals could only get eight pounds of gas in our twenty pound tank. After going back to the bank to get more money, Mark and I went to the little hardware store here on Gan and rented a full tank of propane. After seven hours, a couple of pounds of gas have dripped through the system, but we still have a ways to go. Lynne and I walked across the causeway to Feydoo to visit Two Plus One, the little supermarket we like. We picked up the carrots we bought the other day, and I bought some more limes, some peppers that look like Hungarian Banana peppers, laundry detergent, and razor blades. Nothing is cheap here, but at least some things are available that we weren’t able to get in India (like liquid laundry detergent). We each order a stalk of bananas to be picked up tomorrow and then we started the walk back to the anchorage. We made a quick stop at Supermarket 3 and then back to Gan.
At 5:15 in the late afternoon, we tried giving Heather, Jed, and boys a call on Skype. We just can’t figure out the Skype issue here. Sometimes we have a great connection and other times we just get the “unable to complete your call” message. This evening was one of those times, so we called the telephone instead of the computer and made arrangements to try another call at 7 pm Washington, DC time (4 am here). Lynne had invited Mark and I over for pizza tonight, so promptly at 6 pm we jumped in the dinghy and went over to Constance. It was a fabulous pizza dinner and we enjoyed the time to talk about our upcoming passage to Chagos.
Tomorrow’s big job is getting checked out and then doing the final, final shopping before departing here on Monday morning. Chagos, here we come.
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| 100327 Day 152 Maldives–Underwater at Northern Addu Atoll |
