Ugh – Police have banned our afternoon swim

A very hot night with the added disturbance of the police boat coming through at about 2am.

We stopped to chat to a woman on our morning walk who we pass everyday laden with a backpack and huge bottle of water. I was curious to find out what she got up to as she wears serious walking boots and always looks so determined. Turns out she is English and has been here 4 years. She lives on the other side of the island, so she starts walking at 5am to come to a tiny hidden beach this side where she has a quick swim and then returns to be home by 9am – so she has to walk determinedly! We knew the general direction, so we set off to find it and can understand why she makes the long walk to it. The last 100m is down a path so at least the police patrol cars can’t spot it. But we did spot a huge collection of wet clothes by the road and thought it must also be a very good spot to land an illegal migrant boat, which are called sloops here. Judging from the Governor’s letter and our experience with the lady, it is a big problem here.

Steamy day back on board Pole Pole, especially as I decided to have a scrub down of the bathroom. Our afternoon swim was very welcome, Rowan swam out the marina entrance to go and join the Aussies outside for a snorkel. It’s quite a tough swim through if the tide is moving in or out, so I opted to join the rest for our afternoon gentle chinwag swimming exercise in the marina. There is a road along the one side and a police car came and stopped for a while, then they drove up to the jetty and called us over. They told us we needed to get out and that we were not allowed to swim. What a big blow to us, we begged as we said we were all in boats and it was the only way to cool off in this heat. They were extremely pleasant about it but would not budge. We will have to swim under Pole Pole’s bridge, even the drone wont be able to spot us there!

Lorraine and Chris lent us the movie ‘Yesterday’, that they had on a memory stick. What fun to have a movie night, and one so topical. It was produced by Danny Boyle and set in Lowestoft, lots of places we recognised, including the house of a lady who worked for Rowan at Naked. She lives in an old railway station in a Bird Reserve between Norwich and Yarmouth. It is so quaint, on the weekend they are allowed to flag down the train for a pick up. Rowan remembers her talking all about the film crew moving in and it’s taken us this long to see it. Highly recommend it, very easy watching with lots of Beatles music, a very good distraction.

Our little Green Backed Heron who lives next door and makes lots of noise. Wiki says they are one of the few tool using birds, using lures to attract their prey fish!