Peace Out Port Blair: Wed. 02/12

After a month sailing around the islands of Andaman with two different groups of people, Shawn and Ally of course, then Riss, Edgar and Alex, (the Russian with three names, Alexandra, Alex and Sasha. She reminds me of Rocky Racoon’s girlfriend. Her name was MacGill and she called herself Lil but everyone knew her as Nancy). That was a long way wasn’t it? And of then Caroline and Roberto, we finally said goodbye to Port Blair and the Andaman Island yesterday. A wee bit of departure delay because of bureaucracy. Finally heading out around 14:00. We are now in open waters and on 2 hour shifts that rotate every 6 hours. Shawn does one  2 hour shift a day because he sleeps in the salon in case we need him right away so his sleep pattern sucks. Because he’s up almost every hour making sure all is well. So his 2 hour shift allows our shifts to change times each day. For example I started at midnight last night and will be starting at 2am tomorrow morning. I hope that makes sense. If not, over a beer when you see me next I’ll explain. It might take two beers.

Prior to departure and after immigration we headed to the market for one more food shopping trip and also to get rid of whatever rupees we all had left. If you’ve been following along here you can guess where I went and what I was looking for. The first Government agency store was closed at 11:00am. They must have run out of everything. So I asked my faithful Tuk Tuk driver to go to the next one which I knew was open because we passed it on the way to the immigration office earlier . The Tuk Tuk driver was not so optimistic. It was open. I went up to the non premium barred window. Oh yeah big steel bars on these babies. I asked if they had any beer. The answer of course was no. Using my biggest puppy dog eyes that I could muster I asked again. The man said do you want 2, picture puppy dog eyes now, I said 8. He looked at me and said 150 rupees each. I said no problem. Then he said to me that this was his last 8 from his personal supply that he keeps at the store. If there were no bars I would have kissed the blessed man. Instead I tipped him 500 rupees. Back to the jetty to wait for the others. The one thing about Tuk Tuk’s is they are metered just like cabs but very often the meters don’t work or don’t get switched on. Similar trips end up costing whatever you can negotiate. My driver, when I asked how much $ he smirked and said 300 rupees. Other days the same trip costed anywhere from 50 rupees and up. So because I was trying to get rid of the rupees I slipped him 500. He was very pleased.  

I cannot believe that as I write this blog I am two weeks away from the end of this adventure. Time is funny. At the beginning in Thailand the idea of two months seemed so long. Two weeks from now I’ll be flying to Scotland to see my youngest daughter Tess as well as my cousins that are all over there. 

Since we have left Port Blair it has been a spinnaker sail all the way. Which for me is a first. To overnight with the spinnaker up. I may have mentioned before this is a very efficient sail and we get maximum speeds with the wind provided. as an example with wind speeds of 7.6kts we get a speed of 6.1kts.

No marine life yet but it’s only been one day. I’m going to get some sleep now as my shift starts in a few hours.