'I like these,' Delphine said, chewing on a golf ball. Well, not quite a golf ball; a chenette. Chenettes are the Caribbean lychee, they grow on trees in bunches, have thick green skins and don't look like much until you peel them and discover the fleshy pink skin and a golf ball underneath. It's chenette harvest time right now and they're being sold everywhere. People pick them out their trees and sit at bus stops, in the mall, on chairs just outside their houses selling them. Two ladies seem to have coined the market, each with a supermarket trolley filled to the brim on a street corner by the market. Everyone sells them for a dollar a bag, a Eastern Caribbean dollar which makes chenettes just about the cheapest purchase for just about anything in the Caribbean. In fact, Bertrand, our taxi driver says that when people in the country go to watch a show or an outdoor concert, they bring buckets of chenettes to pick their way through. He also says that leatherback turtle soup is really oily but he's from the North and that's about as wild as you get in Grenada. 

Delphine was watching Dumb and Dumber on the computer for about the 11th Dumb and Dumber time when the fun began. A pile of empty chenette skins lay in front of her on the table. Suddenly she looked up, alarmed. 'I think I've just swallowed one.' Swallowing one is no easy feat. 'Are you sure?' A slightly pale nod followed. 'What do we do now?' Jack said to me in a low voice, pointing to the back room. Now, apologies if you're all eating your lunch but I think it's time to explain our heads. Just hold on, it won't take long: it’s just that after about blockage no. 6 on Quest, we finally stopped treating our sea bowl like a regular land bowl, stopped putting paper down it with all these women on board and hung a bag up instead, became generous with the vinegar wash and since then, the toilet has been much happier. See, all done! Oh and also we brought out a blanket ban on eating corn. But a chenette stone? At that moment I found myself in the position I'd never knowingly signed up for; predicting a kid's future bowel movement. I took a breath. 'Delph, maybe try not to go to the bathroom on Quest. If you need to go, you could use the bathroom at sailing camp.' Delphine looked unsold. 'The mozzies in there are huge,' Lulu piped up but I ignored her. 'The stone will probably have broken down by the time of its re-appearance anyhow,’ I said. Now, everyone looked unsold. 

In keeping with Quest's typical style, we clean forgot about it. For four days. Well, Delphine may or may not have forgotten about it, you'd never get the truth out of her but like all good gravitational pulls, the chenette stone wasn't under her direct control. I have mixed feelings about not being there when it came out but as Jack repeatedly points out, my theory about possible stone breakdown was wrong. Just wrong. He says that he got first proper wind of it as he was making an afternoon espresso, Lulu was in one of her last amazing ballet classes with Monique and I was loitering as usual on the dance balcony. He says that the first sign of trouble was the sound of the macerator since everything on Quest gets chopped up into little pieces (sorry again! but the fish underneath definitely aren't sorry) and the macerator went from healthy sounding to as if it had got suddenly electrocuted. Jack says it took him about five seconds before he realised the cause of the awful noise, by which point he was glad he'd made himself a coffee. 

Meanwhile, Lulu and I were making our way back to the dinghy dock. I called on the VHF, 'Quest, Quest, can you come and pick us up?' and was surprised to hear Delphine's voice come back. Until that moment, she was usually shy to talk on the radio. 'Daddy's a bit busy at the moment.' Huh, I thought and when he did come to pick us up, he had a not-quite-empty plastic bottle with him. That night we all admired what the human body could do and then clean forgot about it again until a Saturday night during another movie, Pixels with Adam Sandler when we heard a sudden gulp amongst the chenette stones. 'Guys, I did it again.' Jack jumped up and said, 'Don't worry, I've got just the thing this time,' and went up to the cockpit, rooted around and came downstairs with Quest's trusty blue bucket. Delphine looked at it and I watched her eyes fire up like she was going to complain until she thought better of it. Nature's rich bounty. 

Love from Quest and her crew xx