Port Elizabeth

28^th July to 4^th August 2019

Day one: Charlie checked in with customs/immigration, Dave did some work, we all had a lovely play on a beautiful sandy beach. Bliss. Then… Dave dropped the dinghy key in the sea– throwing it to Charlie, as he has done many times before, only this time badly. Amusingly, the night before we were discussing how we didn’t have a spare kill-switch for the dinghy, nor a spare key for the front door. Did nothing about either of those problems. So, Dave dropped the key, in 7-8m of water – we thought that would be fine, got the snorkel, goggles, flippers on ready to nip down and grab it. Couldn’t see the key. The boat had not moved so we have no idea if the key was swept away by current (a spoon we intentionally dropped a few minutes later wasn’t) or eaten by a soon-to-be-poorly fish (the spoon was nibbled, not eaten), or just buried in the sand. It was getting dark, and we were all at various stages of hangry, so we gave up after half an hour or so. Fortunately, we had not locked the boat especially thoroughly so gaining access was no problem… Next morning, Dave went snorkelling, found and retrieved the key no problem. All’s well.

Day two: boat day. Made all the better by a banana bread delivery in the morning, and an ice delivery later on. Yum and yum.

Day three: ready to go to the beach. Noticed our dinghy had no air in two of its tubes. None, not a bit. We knew it was on its last legs but hoped to get a couple of months out of it before we were planning to be in Grenada. It now holds no air. Whoops.

So, we spent a while mulling over different dinghy options – in the longer term I think we’ll end up with a small sailing dinghy (kid-boat) and a larger inflatable (family car). We were mulling over a Portland Pudgy, which might be a bit of a squeeze for us as the kids grow but could develop into the kid-boat with the addition of a sailing rig and be used as a liferaft (we don’t have one). But after looking into shipping options, all of which would have taken a lot of time or cost an astounding amount, we decided to go for an inflatable first. There’s nothing on Bequia, plenty of options in Grenada, so after a few phone calls to establish what was available now we decided to head South earlier than planned.

Once we had decided what to do, Charlotte got a water taxi into town to check-out with customs, and we were off the next morning. Bequia looks beautiful and we’ll be back to explore a little.