Today was chore day. No one particularly felt like doing chores, so we procrastinated until 1400 (2:00 pm), when Christi and Mike jumped in to do the bottom and waterline. There were hundreds of fish in the water around the boat, with lots of schools of fairly large yellowtail fusiliers. With each wipe of the sponge, big black billowing clouds of paint came off the bottom. More paint came off than algae, which was disconcerting. Christi was feeling guilty about releasing poison in the water with all these fish around. Does anyone know if so much paint coming off is normal after the bottom is recently painted?

Eric worked on fixing the autopilot. He has it sort of working, but it is not reliable. It may be getting some kind of intermittent interference or it may not like changes in voltage.

After a little over one tough, grueling hour of chores (you are sensing the sarcasm, right?), we took showers and went to Mahua for an early dinner. Christi and Mike had tons of paint residue come off their bodies in the shower. The plan was to eat a quick dinner and go back and continue on chores.

We ordered food to eat there and requested a pizza for take away. No pizza right now, we’d have to wait for later. OK, we’ll just forget about the pizza. But then we ate multiple courses, and started talking to the people at the table next to us, and all of a sudden it would only be another 45 minutes for our take away pizza, so we stuck around and chatted with the couple some more. So what if Port Control gets mad at us for calling in late yet again? The couple wound up buying us our pizza in exchange for a ¾ empty tube of hydrocortizone cream, which we still don’t think was a fair trade. And we have to reiterate just how good the food is at Mahua.

While we were waiting for our food, a large elephant came by for dinner. Julio had told us about him yesterday. He used to be a work elephant and now he just hangs out in the jungle. Julio loves the elephant and feeds him a kilo of bananas daily. The elephant’s owner is planning to sell the elephant to a temple, where he will be in religious processions and chained to a wall the rest of the time. Julio is donating all the profits of his restaurant to a local fund to buy the elephant so the elephant can continue to happily roam the jungle instead of living in chains. Over the last two days we have met some incredibly generous people. We like this picture of the elephant because you get a sense of the setting the restaurant is in, with all the trees and the weird domes. It’s too bad you can’t see the view of the water in it, too.

Four hours later, we finally returned to Kosmos. We knew we were leaving first thing this morning, so we quickly got everything ready to go so that we could roll out of bed and pull up anchor.