Sail La Vie: Hopetown

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Hopetown

We have been on a mooring in Hopetown for 3 days now and it has been very nice. The first day Brad went kiting on the Hopetown Beach, while I swam and read.

The second day I basically just resting a lot, due to illness. The other day I swallowed a mouthful of salt water while snorkeling and now I have a chest cold, infection. I googled it today and found out that there is a thing called Salt Water Aspiration that can give you flu like symptoms. I have decided not to do the antibiotics yet, and try to let my body fight it off, Daquil in the daytime and Tylenol PM for the nights, the coughing is the biggest pain but I am getting through it. So anyway, I suggest you do not drink the water while snorkeling, this beautiful water does have bacteria in it.

In the evening time we went to an official Cruiser Potluck and it was fun. There were probably 20+ couples, food and music. There were about 4 people with guitars playing and singing all the oldies.

Today we took the dinghy over in 2-3 ft swells to Tahiti beach so Brad could go kite-boarding again, he had fun as usual. I went hunting for shells and found about 10 small conch shells but all of them had conchs living in them, so I left them there. I did find a couple of coral pieces that were worth saving. When we got back we went over to our new friends boat Daruma which the same boat as ours, so it was fun to see how they set theirs up. Mark and Joelle are and couple about our age but no kids. They met in Japan, both had military families, so they lived in a lot of different places growing up. Joelle said she went to high school in the Philippines. Anyway in Japanese a Daruma is a goal setting doll that when you get it, the doll will have no eyes, but then when you find your goal, you color in one of the eyes and then when you fulfill your goal you color in the other eye. So when they came up with the idea of a boat, they bought the doll and colored one eye and then when they found their boat they colored the other eye, pretty cool, huh.

But it sounds to me like they might have a new goal of getting a River Canal boat that they would keep in Europe to cruise the canals. Maybe they should get another doll for their new doll.