Day 321, Year 5 Quiet Sunday
Date: Sunday, September 12, 2010
Weather: Mostly Sunny Day
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
Today was one of those days where you find yourself constantly busy but accomplishing nothing major-just one little job after another. Mark got both of our bilge pumps working properly once again and put new stuffing in the stuffing box around the prop shaft. So the constant trickle of water that was coming in has stopped. I did some gardening. I pulled up all the basil, cut the tops off, put them in water to root, and then took a fork and turned the soil in the pots. I have six little pots, now four with arugula and two with basil. We use the arugula like lettuce on sandwiches and that is why we need more of it. I went through all the onions and garlic and learned that I have about two pounds of red onions from India that are still good and about six pounds of Madagascar red onions. The size of an onion has shrunk quite dramatically since Thailand. There you could buy onions the size of most you buy at the store in the US. In India, we would sort through bags and bags of onions at the market to come up with the biggest they had which were always smaller than a tennis ball. Here in Madagascar we are down to red onions the size of a golf ball! Surely onions will get bigger again once we are in South Africa.
Mark also spent a good deal of the morning trying to get photos uploaded to Picasa on the web and then linked to our website. The process is excruciatingly slow and very expensive. By tomorrow he hopes to have the “Best of.” folders from Moramba Bay up, so if you want to see those go to Days 293 to 299. We’ll try to get a “Best of Madagascar Underwater” folder uploaded, but then I think we will stop trying and just wait until we get to South Africa to do the rest. The whole episode of trying to get photos uploaded has just been so frustrating. After the photo frustrations, we had yet another frustrating experience. At 11 am we took time to go for a snorkel and it was a total bust. Low tide should have been at 12:30 pm, but there was already a south setting flood which caused the water to be cloudy and the current hard to fight. Ed and Lynne went snorkeling at the same time and Lynne did see a large cowry with its mantle out. Mark found an octopus in a hole in the coral, but it didn’t come out to play. And I just fought with the dinghy trying to keep it off the shallow coral. We have had so many wonderful snorkeling days that I guess we were due for a bad one. Mark went up to talk to John at Sakatia Towers this after and he showed Mark a particular mangrove tree. When the water is just at the base, it is time to go snorkeling. I guess local knowledge goes a long way. So tomorrow morning we’ll use the mangrove indicator and see if things are any better.
When Mark went up to Sakatia Towers in the afternoon to talk with John about a few things and I stayed on the boat and named more underwater photos and called our daughter Heather and family. We needed to find out if our new boat documentation has arrived and it has. So now Heather can send this to South Africa so it will be there when we arrive. It was so wonderful to hear Sam playing a harmonica concert and to hear Jonah talking. He says “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” (the name of an Eric Carle book), momma, daddy, and football. He loves balls of all kinds and once he said football, he just said it over and over. He is also quite good at making kissing sounds over the phone. We will wait and call Justin, Jo, and Ziggy tomorrow as they might still be traveling. I’m hoping we’ll get an email telling us that all went well when they went to get on the plane in London this time. I know they will be happy to be home.
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| 100912 Day 321 Nosy Sakatia, Madagascar–Underwater Sakatia Headland |
