Commodore
February 22, 2022

Enjoying Princess Margaret’s Beach

I was chuffed to start the day by doing my first Wordle, it gave me an ‘Impressive’ prompt for getting it in 3 lines in a couple of minutes! For you in South Africa, I’m not sure if this online newspaper game has hit the country yet, but it has taken the UK by storm. It’s had a lot of publicity, a Welshman created it for his wife to do during lockdown, and he has just sold it to the New York Times for a fortune. The Chadds and Rowan were doing it all last week.

Rowan was also very chuffed that by the end of the morning he had sorted out a whole lot of little maintenance problems, the most serious was fixing the water maker which was making rather salty water. I managed to do a bit of clearing and a long needed tidy up.

We waited for the heat of the day to pass and headed into town to do some provisioning, sadly the best supermarket closes at 4pm, so we will have to live a little longer without bacon! We made do with some fruit and veg, and a stock up of UHT milk, which we are now completely used to, and I love using it for making yoghurt.

After dropping off the provisions and laundry on PolePole we went across the bay in the dinghy to the pontoon at Jack’s Restaurant. We had a lovely walk along Princess Margaret’s beach and were amazed at the huge number of boats anchored there, I lost count after 60. We always anchored there last year and never had more than 15 boats. We walked up and over to Lower Bay which is still magical and much more remote. A little mongrel dog befriended us on the beach and walked all the way back to the dinghy with us, no matter how much we tried to chase him home. He had a collar on so must be local. One of the dogs on Princess Margaret’s beach attacked the poor chap so we had to intervene! Do hope he finally got home ok.

All the masts in Lower Bay

Lower Bay

A curious sign we spotted on the fence of an abandoned plot in Lower Bay

We had another peaceful evening on board, with a classic motor home and enormous classic monohull moored up along side each other, near us. They have many more crew than passengers. Rowan reckons the sailing boat is the husband’s toy and the wife doesn’t like to sail, it has the biggest mast and boom I’ve ever seen.