Day 167, Year 5: Rainy Day in Paradise
Date: Sunday, April 11, 2010
Weather: Cloudy and Rainy; Winds NW to W to SW
Location: Ile du Coin, Peros Banhos Atoll, Chagos
Raindrops were falling on my head at 6:30 this morning. Mark quickly shut the hatch overhead and then we rushed to get everything secured. It was a pouring rain and we were able to catch lots of rain water in buckets to help fill the water tanks. I had put a wash in the shower stall last night to soak, so I hurriedly wrung it all out and hung it outside to rinse in the rain. Once all this was done, we had a special breakfast of bacon, eggs over easy (the first time since Thailand), and toast, and then sat in the cockpit to watch it rain while reading. Mark is reading The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright and I am reading a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun. This novel takes place in the 1960’s in Nigeria and then in the newly formed country of Biafra. Both books are gripping, so it was easy to spend a rainy morning reading. Mark took time out to try his hand at catching squid and he was finally successful. I heard him calling, “Bucket.” So I went running with the bucket to put under the squid to catch the ink he was squirting. We don’t want to have to clean that off the boat. So now we had a squid but we didn’t know what to do with him. I love calamari, but the sight of this beautiful creature in a bucket made me think I might just have to change my tastes, but this one needed to be put out of his misery, so we called Ed on Constance. While he was giving us detailed directions, we saw Carol of Nepenthe headed our way. She is a master squid catcher, so we took advantage of her timely visit to have her show us how to deal with squid. She brought us a couple of pieces of upside down cake for lunch dessert and we gave her the last of our very over-ripe bananas. The rain subsided in the afternoon and the clothes on the life lines began to dry. We had happy hour on Constance with Jim and Carol of Nepenthe and Cathy and Jeff of Mirage. There are just the four boats here right now and it was great to get together.
If you are interested in seeing where we are located, evidently you can do that by going to Google Maps. Our friend Alan Kanegsberg in Concord, New Hampshire, wrote today, “We are following you on Google Maps. It is hard to locate the particular atoll you are on, but once you find it you can zoom in very close and read the names. You can see that there is virtually nothing but trees. You can see the buildings you are describing and the remnants of the old pier. To find it, you follow a line from India to Mauritius. Halfway there is a lighter blue area. Zooming in on the big one and then moving a little north
shows the necklaces of surface land that surround each lagoon. If you move south to Diego Garcia, you can see the military ships anchored inside the reef.” The next time you have a rainy day, maybe you can see if you can find our little paradise.
It is Sunday evening here, but Sunday morning in New Hampshire. Probably all of my teacher friends in Concord will be gathering this morning for a memorial service honoring a teacher and a friend who died suddenly this week and my thoughts are certainly with them. They are gathered to honor Sue Ann Martin, one of the best teachers I have ever known. She could help kids reach deep inside themselves and bring forth their best. She was a wonderful mother, teacher, and friend and it seems so unfair that she should die so young. At 50, Sue Ann was still running five miles every morning before breakfast. She was as fit as a 50 year-old woman could be, but a strep infection went into her blood system and spine and took her quickly. She was teaching on Monday and was gone by the end of the week. The Concord Monitor reported that only 1 in 100,000 die of this type of infection. Our thoughts are with her family and all of our mutual friends. Life is so precious and we must all remember to live each day to its fullest.
