22nd January - Coron (Busuanga)

Thursday 22^nd January

Our nearest neighbour in Coron is a big yellow boat which goes out to Apu Reef for three day live-aboard diving sessions.  It is very pretty; not too sure if it is also very comfortable inside…I have heard scary tales of people having to sleep in bunks in the engine hold, smelling very much of diesel and oil.  But maybe not on this pretty yellow boat!

Many jobs to do on 2XS...

Yesterday Pete spent many hot and busy hours trying to decipher the tangle of wires in the…well, in the wire cupboard, for want of a better descriptor…so that he could install the new depth sounder.  Some of the wires are obsolete, but…which ones???

A small toddler (Johanna-Lee) has been visiting 2XS, just occasionally.  She is only around twelve months old but has managed to make her presence felt, as toddlers do.

Johanna-Lee with her parents Bernard and Emily, and Pete, an object of fascination to her

We are very tickled by the fact that she managed to eat quite a large portion of South America…Rosie was horrified and tried to prise the pieces out of Johanna-Lee’s resisting jaws, and to restore South America in puzzle form, but it was all too soggy.  Good thing we have other maps and that this one was only for decoration, not navigation.

Tonight we are anchored off this very pretty little island, inhabited only by two very cheery dogs.  

They have quite a nice life, I think.  They have the run of an island with shelter and – presumably – water, and every day kindly people come in little dive boats to play with them and feed them.

I took some photos of the contents of our luggage, which came with us Melbourne-Hobart-KL-Manila-Coron-2XS.  We didn’t lose any of it, and only once did we have to pay excess baggage, although these items were fearsomely heavy.  Pete just…shifted them around from hand luggage to checked-in luggage to pockets to computer bag.  The anodes had to move into hand luggage.  They are on the front left in the photo, silver half-egg shapes, heavy as…lead!  Every time they showed up on the xray machine Pete had to explain patiently what they were for and what they were made of.  Not silver?  Disappointing… At one of our last embarkation points the security  bloke noticed, quite rightly, that an anode would make a very efficient weapon.  It took a few hundred pesos to persuade him that maybe anodes were quite safe on a plane  after all…

Today we have had brooms and scrubbing brushes out and 2XS has ben scrubbed and jiffed within an inch of its life.  Our Bernard-Toby-Rosie team had kept the inside of the boat very clean, and the hull, but the decks and roof areas were covered with smoggy grubbiness.  Very satisfying to get rid of it all, for the moment.

Rosie went for a very long swim.  She was gone for several hours; we were faintly worried.  But she was very happy indeed – she had been hunting!  And she had bagged a catch of sea urchins… She went around the corner of the island where nobody could see her and ate the lot.  “Alive!” she said, with great gusto.  She put the shells back in the sea and was very amused to see them walking away, unaware that they were quite empty.  I was pleased to see her so sparky and animated; she hasn’t been well at all, has very bad kidney issues and feels crook, tired, miserable most of the time.  But not when she is hunting in the warm sea!

Rosie

For Christmas Angela gave me a block of sturdy soap in an equally sturdy strong bag thingy.  She says it is wonderful and will remove any stains with just a bit of a scrub.  I have some challenges for this soap!  It was very saying, spreading out a particularly ghastly once-white t-shirt and giving it a really good go.  Tomorrow I will rinse it out and stand back to admire blinding whiteness on the line!  

Magical soap and an already improved t-shirt

I think this soap deserves - a close-up!

A note from Nicky

Tasmanians are, I think, quite unusual in their attitude towards the weather. No matter what, we remain optimistic and enthusiastic.  We swim in the cold, we hike in the wind, rain and sleet and we kick back and enjoy the sunshine when it comes.  In fact, I have been known to be very defensive when anyone dares complain about the weather in Tasmania. "Well it was just fabulous on Saturday/last week/last summer!"  I'll say.  "You should have been here then."  In today's paper the curator of one of the MONA exhibitions made a comment about our choice to live 42degrees south, suggesting that this is the price we pay but it's worth it.  Bad weather certainly didn't keep the crowds away there.  Good on us, I say!  Having said all of that, I am quite keen to get a bit more beach time in before I go back to work.

Nicky with one of her adoring nieces (Eva, in this case…)

So true!