Day 263, Year 5 All Alone
Date: Friday, July 16, 2010
Weather: Sunny Day with Madagascar Clouds
Location: Nosy Mamoka, NW Madagascar
It was a quiet day here at Nosy Mamoko. Constance left before sunrise headed back to Nosy Sakatia and the other two boats which were here also left early. So for the first time in a long time, we were all alone. Lynne has a place on her ankle that has developed into an open sore that will not heal. At first thought it was a bite, but now she is just not sure as another place has developed beside the first one. So she needs to see a doctor and she talked John at Sakatia Towers and asked him to help her make arrangements for this. She couldn’t get an appointment today, but has a 6:15 am appointment tomorrow morning. The doctor has to fly out to one of the islands to do an operation and is only available early. Getting from Constance to land in a dinghy before dawn won’t be fun, but when they get there, John’s driver Anatole will pick them up and take it from there. We won’t know what the doctor says until tomorrow evening at 6 pm when we will talk to Ed and Lynne on the radio. There is absolutely no cell service here, so there is no chance of a phone call. We’re certainly hoping this is a simple infection, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
In the meantime, we are going to move a little further southwest to another anchorage tomorrow that is supposed to have a village and a waterfall. The next day we will probably leave very early and try to make it to Russian Bay where we plan to spend a week or so. Hopefully, Ed and Lynne will be able to catch up with us there. Today we had lots of visitors wanting to trade for eggs, small fish, bananas, and papaya. We traded rope, fish hooks, and empty glass and plastic bottles for a beautiful stock of bananas and three papayas. I don’t need eggs yet and we keep hoping to catch our own fish, but that is looking grim at this point. Fish are jumping out of the water all over the place here, so we went out in the dinghy this afternoon and tried to catch some of them. But no luck! We have some beautiful dinner-sized fish living under our boat, but we can’t catch them either. Even the locals tried with their spears, but they were not successful. But we’ll keep trying. We walked along the beach at low tide this afternoon and enjoyed seeing many of the same trees and bushes that we saw in Chagos. We found one stand of baobab trees and chased a heron to get photos, but that was about it. We took the dinghy past the village but we did not go ashore. Tomorrow we will go ashore at the village in the next anchorage, so I’ll report on that tomorrow night.
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| 100716 Day 263 Nosy Mamoko, Madagascar–Shore Explore |
