25th March 2016 - Good Friday on 2XS, Samal Island

Friday 25^th March  – Good Friday 2016

Bicycle powered trike - hard work in the heat!

To celebrate Good Friday Pete and I are…working.  It is – oh how surprising – very VERY hot.  We have lugged the last of our stuff (Pete doesn’t call it stuff; he calls it SHIT, In bitter tones,) from the big storage box in the workshed.  The carpenters and painters had moved nearly everything out of the cabins while they were working; it is an immense job to get it all sorted and back in place.  And we are chucking a lot of things which we have been lugging around forever.  For example, beautiful big couch bolsters which are too big, thick, wide for the couches…They are never going to get smaller; the couches are never going to get bigger.  They were obviously made to the wrong specifications, back in the early non-Pete days of 2XS.  And now they can find a happy home in the Philippines, on Samal Island.

I have taken everything out of the locker under the helm, the realm of snorkels, masks, flippers and a few strange slimey items… I have washed everything and thrown out a lot of…slime.  Satisfying!

Today I am doing three loads of washing.  This takes much longer than one would think.  There are automatic washing machines here but they have to be nursed most tenderly, because the water pressure is very low, and because the power cuts out every now and again, throwing the machines into panic and confusion.  So I am sitting in the mercifully cool big laundry/storage room, leaping up every now and again to switch the machine back on, or to add water from a hose.  It will all be worth it, to have lovely clean bedlinen, teatowels, clothes!!

Tonight is the weekly pot-luck marina BBQ.  A few boats are leaving tomorrow, heading south, so it will be a bit of a farewell, to Labyrinth (Jason and Jolene, Australia,) and Storm  Boy (Gina and Ahmed, Turkey.)