Friends Won, Hats Lost

Location: Tyrrel Bay, Carriacou (again)

Fake news when I said that I lost my hat on the Grenada-Carriacou trip. I found it again amidst a pile of books on the coffee table. I actually lost it when going from Sandy Island back to Carriacou. Any trip to Tyrrel Bay seems predisposed to the loss of headgear.

TLDR: Went for dinner and met people of various temperaments, went snorkeling in an actual reef, sailed back to Tyrrel Bay, fed my sweeth tooth.

Wednesday evening, we got invited by the guy who helped us secure our second mooring for dinner at a small place called the Paradise Beach Club, along with a few other people. The group consisted of Jem and I, our inviter, who was a man from Illinois called Bryan and his Polish wife who liked beer, an eclectic couple from Ontario who brought along a recorder (the kind that we played in elementary school but bigger), and a Californian couple with whom I talked most of the night. Their names suited them well; Andrew was very much an Andrew, and Jazz was very much a Jazz. Her hobbies included pole dancing, aerial yoga, and krav maga. She also had a tendency for constructing timelines of major life events through boob size. Also, their cat has an instagram.

In St. George's, the Digicel store (our phone plan company here) told us that we would be able to transfer our data plans from Grenada to St. Vincent. We got a call on Wednesday that this was not the case. Therefore, my approximately $45 CAD worth of data, that was supposed to last a month, would expire in less than a week. After grumbling about it for a few hours, I decided to make the best of the situation and scrolled through many, many memes. 

My data loss sadness was also somewhat compensated by the fact that on Thursday, a dinghy guy called Renny motored up with some watermelons. Watermelons in Montreal are around the size of a basketball. These watermelons were around the size of a two-year-old. We each had a few slices for breakfast. Renny is also a fisherman and sold us a small-ish tuna that we had for dinner. I do enjoy the quantity of good cheap seafood here.

That day, we went snorkeling again. We went off the north part of the island this time, and saw a very nice reef. You really don't get a sense of how weird corral is until you come face-to-face with it. To me, the thing that corral most looks like is fungus. There are rods that look like that fungus that makes zombie ants. There are brain-like structures that seem covered in fungus. There are flattened blobs that look like 3D bread mold. But all in an aesthetically pleasing way. Anyway, here's a picture of some of the cute little fish there.

(Doesn't the corral look like mold?)

Friday, we sailed on our way back to Tyrrel Bay. I hadn't thought of the practical implications of having a beautiful comfy bimini (roof over the cockpit), but one of the drawbacks is that it sometimes doubles the distance needed to go from one side of the boat to the other, which is already quite far due to the fact that it's a catamaran. Also, the electric winch got tired in her old age, so she doesn't really work in any situation where an electric winch would be greatly appreciated. Despite this, it was great to get sailing again after a year-long hiatus, and the trip up was very fun.

(That metal drum in the bottom-left part of the picture is a winch. To move sails around, you wind a line around it a couple of times and pull. If the line still needs pulling but you're not strong enough, you put a handle on the top of the winch and rotate it. In big racing boats, using a winch is a full-time job; the people who do this are known as "grinders." On a similar note, VHF radio channel 69 is named "pleasure.")

I lost my hat (for real this time) on the sail up. Jem lent me a quirky white bucket hat from St. Helena. I wore it as we did our customs work (where we met Andrew again, this time sporting blue toenails after a spa day) and went grocery shopping. We bought a delightful amount of bagels, which, despite being not as good as the classic Montreal bagels, are still quite acceptable, and found a wonderful type of chocolate-covered oatmeal cookie that Jem had bought there a few weeks back. I immediately ate too many. We're gonna say that because it's oatmeal, it's healthy.

To my American readers, good luck with the elections. To raise your spirits, look at this picture of a cute wooden boat that we're anchored next to, and comfort yourself with the fact that you're not in charge of its upkeep.