Thursday 7^th May – Monastir, Tunisia

35:46.823N 10:49.956E

This morning we were up early again – though not sure why.  The sun was shining and the sky was blue.  The P’s were still asleep so I made a fresh fruit salad ready for breakfast.

Just as we returned from the shower, one of the inside boats along the pontoon decided to move a couple of positions down towards us.  The manoeuvre was quite difficult for them as they have a 43 foot boat and it is really narrow between the pontoons.  Richard went on deck to help and leapt aboard next door’s boat to help them in. 

After that, as there was no wind, Richard and I took the genoa down as we needed to do yet more repairs to the sun strip.  As the wind is due to gust up over the weekend we will keep it down until after the strong wind has gone through.  The noise of us working on the foredeck awakened the P’s so they were soon up for breakfast. 

Later in the morning we all went for a walk into town and visited the medina and the market.  The stalls in the medina are geared towards tourists and everyone is trying to get you to go into their shop.  The market is much better and we bought fresh tuna at an unbelievably cheap price and some fresh vegetables.

Mum needed to buy a pair of sunglasses and so on the way back to the marina we allowed ourselves to be persuaded to look at some at one of the stalls.  Mum found a pair she quite liked and asked the price.  The lad mistook us for naive tourists and tried to prise too much out of us - his starting price was 75TD (£37.50).  We knew that they were asking 10TD (£5) at the marina shops so we decided to leave when he said we could have them for half price – he had to be kidding!  He came chasing us down the road and eventually said how about 15TD (£7.50) but we were fed up with him by then and carried on.  We called at another shop on the way back and Mum found what she wanted and we got them for 8TD (£4) so we were happy (as was the shopkeeper).

This afternoon Richard repaired the sun strip on the genoa and we stowed it away.

Early evening we had a BBQ with the tuna steaks marinated in olive oil garlic and lemon – delicious!

We stayed on deck in the cockpit enclosure until it was quite late, then went down below and had a game of tri-onimoes before bed.