Day 195, Year 5: Happy Mother’s Day
Date: Sunday, May 9, 2010
Weather: Partly Sunny; Threatening Clouds
Location: Ile Fouquet, Salomon Atoll, Chagos
What a wonderful day! I borrowed Lynne and Ed’s satellite phone and called both of my favorite mothers, our daughter Heather and our daughter-in-law Jo. It was so good to hear their voices and hear a squeaking Ziggy and Jonah in the background and Sam marching around the house chanting, “Mother’s Day, Mother’s Day.” I also got to talk to Jed and to Justin, so it was a perfect Mother’s Day for me. Thank you, Ed and Lynne, for being so gracious.
The day was also perfect in other ways. Although the skies are constantly threatening, we actually had a mostly sunny day. I got up super early and sanded my Dorade boxes and then Mark and I went snorkeling on the big bommie to the south of where we are anchored. Low tide was at 6 am so it was two hours after low when we went out this morning. We were able to snorkel towing the dinghy over the bommie without the bottom touching any coral. We saw a beautiful moray eel, hundreds of six-inch long Blue-and-Yellow Fusiliers swimming in schools, and a number of a deep red fish that we are yet to identify. We then moved further in toward shore and snorkeled along the reef there. Mark tapped me on the shoulder to ask if I had seen the shark and I asked him if he meant the grouper I was watching. This grouper was so big that in the distance he did look a bit like a black-tip shark. We also saw the largest Blackstreak Surgeonfish that we have ever seen. He was probably eighteen inches long when most of the ones we see are more like ten inches. And to top it off we saw Saddleback Coralgrouper that was probably two feet in length. Any of these guys would have made a great dinner, but it wasn’t on that reef that dinner was caught. Mark and Ed went out through the pass later in the morning and Mark caught a Giant Trevally. This guy was over two feet in length and he made a great Mother’s Day dinner! I used a recipe from a seafood cookbook that Justin and Jo gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago. It said that trevally is so good that you don’t want to overpower the delicious taste. So I followed the directions for Florida Pompano barbeque marinade and the fish turned out just superb. We had Ed and Lynne over and we enjoyed the catch together.
The low point for the day was that my only five-gallon bucket got a crack in it. This is my main laundry bucket, in other words, my washing machine, but Mark also takes it with him when he goes fishing to hold all his gear and then to hold the fish. When we left Boston, we left without a five-gallon bucket. By the time we reached Samoa, I was desperate for one and when our son Justin came there to visit, he walked from hardware store to hardware store trying to find one for me. He finally saw an empty one in a store. It was a bucket of rat poison that had just been emptied, and Justin talked the people in the store into selling it to him. They could not understand why he wanted an empty rat poison bucket, but they let him have it and it has been my mainstay bucket for the past four years. Smaller plastic buckets are always plentiful, but a sturdy five-gallon bucket is hard to come by in the islands. So our first search in Madagascar will be for a new ‘washing machine’ for me-my belated Mother’s Day gift.
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| 100509 Day 195 Salomon, Chagos–Mark's Big Trevally Catch |
