Day 280, Year 5 A Day in the Life
Date: Monday, August 2, 2010
Weather: Rain Overnight, Still Cooler Than Normal
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
Today I did a mammoth laundry and continued to work on the Ankarana photos. Mark spent his entire morning trying to get some photos on the website, but he had no luck at all. He thinks he has a computer virus that he can’t get rid of with Spybot and it is slowing things down to a snail’s crawl. Heather and Jed put some great photos on their Picasa site, but we can’t download those either. We can only view them in thumbnail size but can never get the enlargement. So something has gone awry. We’ll keep working on that but photos might have to wait until South Africa. After striking out with his efforts to post photos on the website, Mark cleaned the fuel filter and changed the anti-freeze in the engine. In the early afternoon, Ed and Lynne came over to see photos from our inland trip and we spent the whole afternoon looking at photos and just generally checking in with one another. Lynne and I had fun looking at some of our underwater photos from Chagos and from here. Mark and Ed spent time studying our fuel polishing system. Then it was time for us to go visit with Bruce and Nadine on Pioneer. We met them on the Sakatia Towers deck last week and they really wanted to hear about trip inland. Bruce is British and Nadine is Italian but they are now from Cape Town in South Africa. They crewed on boats in the 1980’s and 90’s together and Bruce did some serious racing, but eleven years ago they settled in South Africa and had Tristen. She is a beautiful ten year-old and we really enjoyed our evening with them. They are on a catamaran that they delivered from South Africa. They will be here until late September when they will fly back to South Africa. Tonight we shared information with them about our inland travel and they shared information about their trip from South Africa to Nosy Be. It was a delightful evening and we hope to talk to them more tomorrow before we both leave here headed in different directions.
We will stay here tomorrow and then we think we will head to Hell-ville to refuel and replenish the food supply. From there we will go back to Nosy Komba to visit the black lemers. From there we will cross the channel back to Nosy Be to Lokobe National Park where we have learned from Bruce and Nadine that we can do a nice two-hour walk and get fresh water for laundry. By the weekend we will be headed south for about three weeks. We are really looking forward to that explore.
