I got very excited yesterday evening when a pelican paddled close to the boat and I thought I would get some good photos as they dive for fish in the late afternoon. However my enthusiasm was soon tempered by the fact that it was a young bird with a broken or damaged wing and couldn’t fly. It was drifting across the bay in the breeze and looked very forlorn as it repeatedly tried and failed to fly. Presumably it had hit something when diving too close. We wondered what we could do but you can’t really scoop up a pelican into the dinghy and take it to the local vet. There is a doctor nearby whose surgery and house is the prow of a ship built on the shoreline and immaculately painted white and pale blue. It even has an anchor chain! I doubt however that she would would know what to do with an injured pelican any more than the house doctor on Vega. We toyed with the idea of dispatching it from its misery but gory memories of the bludgeoned Dorado came back to haunt us. It probably wouldn’t look very good swinging a mallet at some unfortunate pelican as we chased it across the harbour. Maybe when it reaches the shore the gallic urge to eat anything of organic origin will seal its fate.

I have been surprised to see the extent to which it is possible to cruise under sail. We have come across several cruise ships with masts and one or two proper clipper sailing vessels. We met an English couple on the beach at our last mooring who were from the Star Clipper. They had little idea where they were and even less where they were going but loved the ceremony surrounding the unfurling and furling of the sails and sailing between the islands. This morning there is anchored behind us what looks like a huge private motor vessel but with masts and that may be a small cruise ship. It must be the vessel that I noticed sailing in towards the island last night. So, when the urge and the energy to grind winches has waned there will still be the opportunity to savour life before the mast.

In the meantime I have finally got around to polishing some of the neglected metalwork. Alex and I did have a go in The Gambia but I have been noticing the rust staining on those parts that we didn’t have time to attend to. Some of the larger shackles looked quite rusty as did the rail wires where they run through the stanchions. So with time to kill in the warm late afternoon sunshine I set to with the cleaner/polish and was amazed to find how beautifully everything polishes up. I even took off the locker hatch catches where rust stains had been forming on the fibreglass beneath them. There was a thick coating of rust beneath that soon came off with the fibreglass cleaner and the catches themselves polished up to their original gleaming self. The same with the shackles attaching blocks to the boom and the fittings on the end of the rail wires - all looking rusty but polishing up a treat. Really satisfying but also mystifying to a non chemist like myself. If stainless steel rusts how does it polish up so well? Maybe it is just a very thin surface layer that rusts and makes things look worse than they are. Anyway everything from cotter pins to shackle pins is now getting the treatment and is gleaming like Hollywood teeth.

Finally we have just had the most awful heart stopping moment. For a few moments we could hear the cries of some French woman outside and when they were getting close to us we went up into the cockpit to see the stern of a yacht just about to crash into us. It was exactly the same frozen moment when the Spanish guy went into the back of us in Galicia and wiped out the Hydrovane. They were trying to pick up the mooring next to us with he on the bow and she in the cockpit, standing there looking at us and seemingly incapable of steering away or motoring forwards. How they missed us I will never know - I can only think the wind must have blown them away from us with millimetres to spare.

ps the pelican below is not the injured one!