I wake up at three in the morning with a crushing headache, self inflicted by last night’s lovely wine so no sympathy is expected, but as I grope around for pain killers, it’s given anyway. Bless him. A few hours later, normality is restored - I have tea in bed. Mind you I have to kick Mike out in order to get it – he’s out of the habit and needs several insistent nudges in order to take the hint.
We leave later than yesterday for the boatyard and arrive to find two men scraping the hulls of the boat. Good, a continuance of activity.
Mike decides that we will give our breadmaker a try so on it goes while we get on with our jobs. I re-organise the wardrobes and leave everything open to air while Mike gets down to the less enviable task of opening the valves to the holding tank so that any … outflow shall we say … does not go into the sea. When we go through the Panama Canal we have to use the holding tanks and the time to check that this all works is now, not at the last minute. It’s a good job he decides to do this now as two valve handles break immediately he tries to turn them. If his mate Steve was here, he’d have knocked up a metal one for us with no problem. As he’s not, Mike sticks them back together with Araldite, leaves them to set, and gets on with trying to turn the valves using a selection of tools and a lot of bad language. When he takes the cover off, the whole thing is caked in lime scale, which, as it is brown instead of white, is obviously mixed with something more unpleasant. He cleans it off then I clean him off with Lysol and washing up liquid. The poor man has four of these to do. Lovely.
By noon all is quiet around the boat as all the workers have knocked off for lunch. Shouts and screams come from their little hut as the usual lunchtime game of dominos takes place. They get very excited about it all!
I knock up something to have with our bread when it is ready. Looking in the cupboards I find anchovies, tinned Mexican chillies and olives. I throw all these into my mini chopper with olive oil and raw garlic and voila, tapenade, sort of. We slap it onto thick wedges of hot bread and stink the boat out.
For dessert I chop up the large papaya but it is really disappointing. The outside looks a bit overripe with a couple of patches that look distinctly grungy so I presume it is ready but when I try it, it has no juice and very little flavour. Not having a whole lot of fresh stuff to hand I some of it anyway and force feed it to Mike who is very reluctant to eat any more after the first piece.
After lunch I carry on with my cleaning but it’s very difficult as I can only run enough water for one sink load which I can’t empty as it will drench the men underneath the boat and all their equipment. I can’t use the other sink as we only have one plug!
By 4pm we’ve had enough and call for a lift. As we leave, there are three men under our boat, one scraping the hull and the other two watching. Scraping with just one hand (and holding a lit cigarette in the other) the job is going to go on and on although I am sure it is a very unpleasant task.
Back at La Sagesse, Mike sets up the PC on the veranda and I go for a little walk along the beach to take photos.
Back at the cottage I pour myself the remaining glass of wine. No chance of a hangover tomorrow!
Glad you rented a cottage. the scrapers doing it one at a time with one hand...maybe a BIT longer than estimated.
ReplyDeleteBetter where you are than here in Canada where we have the first snows of the season blended well with rain to make it back breaking work to shovel out...
Have a glass for me...