Day 190, Year 5: More Than a Month
Date: Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Weather: Nice Day but Windy-SE 15 Knots, Gusts to 20
Location: Ile Fouquet, Salomon Atoll, Chagos

We have been in Chagos for just over a month so we are halfway through our stay here. Last night Mark posed the question, “Just how much fresh food do we have left?” Well, the answer is not much, but actually it is more than I would have expected. We still have about 10 carrots from Gan and 5 from India, 2 banana peppers from Gan, a huge bag of ginger from India, and 4 limes from Gan that are refrigerated. We have 8 potatoes and 28 still unripe tomatoes from India, 1 pumpkin and 1 white squash from India, and 4 dozen eggs that are mix from Thailand, India, and the Maldives. I’m keeping a few from each place to see which ones keep the longest. These things are not kept in the refrigerator. We have over 150 onions and about 50 heads of garlic and many bags of flour and rice. We ate the last of the cabbage this week and soon I will use the jar of mashed bananas that I put in the refrigerator a month ago. I poured lime juice on top of the mashed bananas and they are still a beautiful yellow. So we will have one more loaf of banana bread soon. The only meat we have is canned, but with all the fish we have here, meat is just not an issue. I have a number of cans of artichoke hearts and am going to start making a rice-artichoke salad (favorite recipe from my friend Linda Stuart back in Concord, NH) since we haven’t seen lettuce since Thailand and have no more cabbage. I never thought of cabbage as salad material, but shredded cabbage and carrots, along with thinly sliced onions with a lime and olive oil dressing is now one of my newest favorite things. I used to really dislike cabbage, but I have become a lover. We still have 60 rolls of toilet paper and 10 rolls of paper towels, but we are very low on Ziploc bags. My sister offered to give me boxes of Ziplocs when we left North Carolina, but we had no more room in our already overstuffed suitcases. I now wish I had taken more of her generous offer but I didn’t and we will learn to live without baggies. The world would be a much kinder place if we all stopped using so much plastic. We still have lockers full of canned food, but we are starting to use more and more cans each day. But I have a feeling that we will still be eating some of the canned food when we reach the Caribbean next spring. We have enough beer left for each of us to have two cans a day. We have been on this “beer diet” for six weeks now and so far we are sticking to it. I stopped drinking Coke when we arrived in the Chagos so Mark can still have one a day. I think we have enough left for him to continue to have one a day until we leave here, but then he will be without for the month it will take us to reach stores in Madagascar. Yes, we are still two months away from a store, so I’ll give another food update when we arrive in Hell-ville in Madagascar in early July. It will be interesting to see what it is that we have run out of by then.

Today was a free and easy day. We got up super early and I sanded and varnished the cockpit. I thought it was going to be my last coat, but I am not happy with the finish. So tomorrow morning, I’ll give it one more coat and then I will call it quits on that job. We are once again using the toilet that Mark repaired. The fixes he made seem to be working, but it is possible that we still have a small leak at the base of the toilet. We’ll keep watching that and hopefully have a leak-free head before the end of this week. We had hoped to walk to the outer reef at low tide today to take a look at the wrecked cargo ship that has been sitting there for a couple of years, but our tide information was way off. We are going to have to wait for another low spring tide just after the new moon in the middle of month. The water will then be low enough to easily walk out there. Today we would have been trudging through a foot of water and it just wasn’t worth it.

Tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo. A boat named Mr. Curley that comes here year after year always hosts a big all you can drink Margarita celebration down at Boddam, but we are not going to make it. It is just too windy to take the dinghy down there, so Mr. Ed on Constance is going to make margaritas and we will have our own celebration here at Ile Fouquet with Constance and Mirage. So we’ll snorkel in the morning (after sanding and varnishing) and celebrate in the afternoon. Sounds like a plan.