Sunday, May 20 – We all slept late and lounged around in the morning. It felt really good to have nothing we absolutely had to do. Don’t get us wrong we have plenty of boat chores that need to get done, but they could wait.

Eric went for a ride in the dinghy and met some people that were hanging out on their boats. One boat had some mechanical failures with their autopilot and generator. In losing their generator, they also lost their water maker. They had to steer by hand for 7 days (not fun) and could not shower for almost two weeks (eeeewwww). That made us very thankful for the fact that we had absolutely no failures or problems in our time at sea.

At lunch time we all dinghied in to land to go out to eat. As we were walking down the street, Eric recognized someone he had met earlier in the morning while he was on his dinghy ride. We stopped and chatted with her. It turns out she is a teacher at a University in Adelaide, Australia. Christi mentioned that she had gone on a student exchange in Adelaide. It turns out that she teaches at the same school Christi attended, and that when she first started working there, her classes were grouped in with the same department as Christi’s major. This would not be so surprising if it was a big school with a department, but the particular campus we are talking about is tiny smaller than Christi’s high school and the number of students in the program is really tiny. Christi still can’t get over the coincidence.

Anyway, lunch was good. After lunch we went for a walk up a hill to get a view of the bay. As we rounded a bend in the road, a local came running towards us. She greeted us enthusiastically and made it clear she was happy we had come to visit her island. She escorted us for the rest of our walk. We even stopped by immigration again so that Richard could complete his check in process (he had forgotten to bring a necessary document the day before) and she patiently waited for us outside. We never did find out her name, but we did get her picture:

We thought we had several pictures of the two of us that Richard took, but actually they did not take. Here is one of Christi with dog friend in the background.

On a side note, we have been surprised by all the animals around. Cows, chickens, horses, dogs, and cats all just hang out. For the most part, they seem to know where they belong and just stay put. Here is a quick animal montage.

Here a picture looking at the bay.

Most cars are normal, but this one we thought was cool and it quite the view in the background.

We said our goodbyes to our little furry friend and headed back to Kosmos. Later in the evening our new friend from Australia and her boat mates came by for a visit. Once again we called it an early night.

On Monday morning we got up early and headed in to town. Immediately after stepping off the dinghy on to land we had our first equipment failure. Last year, Eric bought a special watch specifically for the upcoming circumnavigation. Those of you that have spent more than five minutes with Eric know how much Eric loves his watch. He gets so excited at any opportunity to show off his amazing little piece of machinery and will talk on incessantly about all of it’s features. Eric is pretty bummed. It looks like a battery failure, but it is hard to say since the battery was just changed. He started trying to figure out complicated plans to get the watch to a jeweler, and then get it back here to us. All the plans are too hard and would be iffy at best to execute. It may have to wait until we fly home to get it fixed. We’ll keep you posted.

Back to our day”¦. we ran a couple errands and got some food from street vendors. The food was quite good. We decided to head back to the boat, where Eric did some necessary boat chores (main engine oil change, generator strainer cleaning, water maker filter change) and Christi napped. We hung out for the rest of the afternoon, just enjoying time to ourselves to rest. We went back into town for a pizza dinner. We ran into some other people Eric had met on Sunday’s dinghy ride, and they joined us for dinner. After dinner we went on our first night time dinghy ride. It was a little bit spooky to be on cruising around in the dark, quite literally in the middle of an obstacle course of boats, lines and dinghies. But, we found Kosmos just fine and no one went swimming.