Friday 16 December – farewell to Luke & George

A steamy night, provided a very good incentive to get George (an engineer) to install the air conditioner (that we lugged over from the UK) for our cabin before their departure to Panama City. He did a great neat job.

Rowan and the fibreglass guy decided hauling PolePole out the water was going to be tricky (our beam would only squeakily fit into the crane!) and expensive. So they decided to crank the daggerboard out with the main halliard on the winch. The winch creaked and groaned and struggled to pull it out, but finally with a lot of jiggling it finally came out. Luckily 6 hefty guys came to do it, it took many nail biting hours until it was finally manhandled onto the dock via their dinghy. What a performance! The good news is it is fixable and they will repair it here on the dock. This means we will be here at least a week as Monday is a holiday.

The saga of the dagger board, finally it is out

The crack!

Up and over the railing

Into the dinghy

Onto the dock

Luke and George went for a quick hike around, as we had heard the jungle walks nearby are great. They came back saying it is an old military base next door with bunkers and old buildings that have been totally overgrown, they saw and heard howler monkeys, and the little black and white monkeys, and some mongooses. It was very sad to say goodbye to them at 2pm, they have been such good company. We had very interesting discussions. Luke was already onto his third book in the short time he was here, all looked incredibly heavy reading to me. They were heading to Panama City for two nights, then straight to S Africa for Luke, and London for George.

Rowan discovered that the catamaran Witwat was here, we met them our first year sailing in the Bahamas. Karen is S African and Dennis is American. Turns out Karen is back in S Africa so Rowan invited Dennis to supper. Rowan also invited a guy who had been recommended to us to do odd jobs like getting the washing machine fixed. John is 71 and English, cruising in a 37 foot racing boat, he does jobs to finance his travels, aiming for French Polynesia too. He brought his young crew Lucy with him. John is a fascinating character, left school at 14, his grandfather was a tailor in London but he grew up on a dairy farm in Surrey. He spent many years breeding and breaking in horses. He has sailed for many years and raced a lot, completed the Fastnet a few times including the scary 1979 race. He chooses his all female crew from an advert on the Tinder app which was a bit surprising, but it works very well he says as he only likes single women, men too full of testosterone! He chooses girls who are unlikely to have the opportunity to explore the world. Lucy from Plymouth had never left the UK before, joined him in the Dominican Republic. It’s a great story, John is thrilled that she has met a young American lad who is currently sailing down around the bottom of Chile and he has asked her to join him in Argentina. What an adventure for her. John has 5 kids he brought up single handily, we never discovered why. He has paid for them all to go to University, the youngest has just finished and now it is his turn to have fun.

Dennis was explaining how they did a 4×4 trip across Southern Africa and that they travelled through Botswana. John asked if he went to the Magadikadi Pans. I asked him how he knew about them and it turn out he joined the French Foreign Legion in his twenties, and was there with the Legion. He was very cagey about elaborating on his time with the Legion. We should have guessed when earlier we asked if he had any problems sailing in the remoter south coast of the Dominican Republic, his reply was they were boarded by some men with pangas, the first guy was as he put it ‘damaged’ by him and they all quickly left! He is clearly as tough as nuts! But the very good news is he is very confident about sorting out the washing machine!

We had a very jolly evening, having a rather under cooked huge chunk of meat on the BBQ! And we went to bed in our chilled, air conditioned cabin!