All ready to crawl into bed last night. Brushed my teeth and got my sleeping shorts on. I had been nodding off reading for the last half hour. I was so looking forward to dropping off to the land of nod. But wait! What's this? The freakin' bed is wet! WTF! Apparently our bouncy ride over yesterday had allowed the seawater to find any chinks in our armor and apparently there were some. Still not sure whether the water came under the caprails and through the hull/deck joint, around failed bedding compound on the stanchions, through the cracked hawsepipes, or maybe down through one or more of the missing deck bungs. Or maybe all of the above. All of these places need attention and we know it. Now I guess we'll actually have to start working on them. Anyway, back to bedtime. Lulu, trooper that she is, stripped off all the wet bedding and re-made the bed with dry stuff. Once I got sleepy again, I slept like a baby but Lulu, who can worry the crap out of any problem, got almost no sleep as she lay awake wondering where the leak was coming from and what we were going to do about it.
This morning, she pulled all the bedding, mattresses, etc. and sent them topside to air out and dry out. This was after she got up and went out to clean all the salt and dirt off the boat so she'd have places to hang stuff to dry. I did, however, reward her with grits and eggs for breakfast. Then, we decided we needed a trip to "town". I pulled the outboard off the dinghy as I am starting to prefer rowing when the conditions are right. We radioed Doug and Jody that we were heading in and shoved off. Our mission was to go to the tienda to see what they had and hopefully get some beer. We also needed to off-load a bunch of aluminum cans and hopefully find somewhere to dump our garbage.
Doug and Jody joined us and we walked up to the tienda which, if you didn't know that's what it was, you'd assume was just another house. They were amazingly well-stocked. Much more than we expected. Lots of canned stuff as well as two different kinds of coffee beans, some produce, and eggs. We bought some orange juice, a cabbage, some salsa, some tostada shells, and a pepper. Although they had eggs, you needed something to carry them in and I'd neglected to pack our egg cartons, so we'd need to go back later. What they didn't have was beer. We walked down the beach to a little palapa that had a Modelo sign out front. Some kayakers told us that they sold beer there. When I walked up, la madre was sitting at a table with her kids doing some sort of project. I asked her (en espanol) if she sold beer "to go" (para llevar). She said she did and went down to the other palapa and dug me out an 8-pack from the ice chest. Then I asked if she served food. She said not right now since she had no fish. But, maybe later, around 6 or 7:00, if she got some fish she'd be cooking and serving food. We decided that we'd give it a try later.
Back to the boat. After doing a couple things, Lulu decided she needed another excursion so she took her pack and headed back ashore to get another pepper (we mislaid the first one somewhere), a couple dozen eggs and another couple of 8-packs of cerveza. Meanwhile I stayed aboard and ran the laundry through the wringer and then hung it all up to dry. When Lulu got back, she made some cookies for Doug, pizza dough for tonight (in case our palapa lady didn't get any fish), and a batch of coleslaw (mostly for me).
Had a pleasant rest of the day and then rowed over the El Gitano to join Doug and Jody for a couple of sundowners and some snacks. Somewhere along the line we dropped the idea of the palapa and, looking through the binoculars I don't see anything happening there anyway. Now that we're back at the boat Lulu is making pizza (salami, mushroom and black olive) and we're getting ready to hunker in for the night. Tomorrow we'll start doing something about the leaks. I also need to do some work on the tiller (it's wobbly and the autopilot pin keeps wanting to come out). But we'll also have some fun. We're thinking about a hike over to the salt flats on the other side of the point. Maybe tomorrow night our palapa lady will have gotten some fish and we can eat out. The weather has been superb. Almost no wind and the night is very still and calm. Maybe tonight Lulu will be able to sleep.And we still need to find out where we can dump our garbage.
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