Friday 14^th & Saturday 15^th Jan

By Friday morning Sarah was well on the road to full fitness again, although she still has some weight to replace!

Steve and I set off in mid-morning on our mission to visit the Mount Gay Rum Distillery and fulfil a few jobs along the way.

We called in at the FedEx office to send off the CD with the CT scans of Sarah to the radiologist in the UK and asked them for directions to the distillery. (We had already been to the bus station where they had told us we needed to go to a different bus station!) The staff at FedEx were very helpful but all the while that the two guys were giving us slightly contradictory advice, the nice lady just kept shaking her head. This would go some way to explaining why we then found ourselves taking a very long way round, but we did at least walk past the Kingston Oval (cricket ground) and finally arrived at Mount Gay which very unhelpfully had no signs up at all, so we walked past it once!

However our luck improved once we had entered and despite the fact that we had just missed the start of a tour, another nice lady suggested we just slip in at the back rather than wait for 45 minutes for the next one. We joined the group of Americans off one of today’s crop of cruise ships and the guide immediately spotted us and got us to introduce ourselves. The tour was interesting and mercifully brief before getting to the crux of the matter which was the tasting. We rather assumed we were supposed to have paid for this tour, but took our cue from the others and willingly joined in. This part of the tour lasted for quite some time as we had glass after glass of the different rums distilled here. We were then taken to the bar where we were invited to continue sampling the same rums some more. They did draw the line at the flagship product, which at 95 pounds a bottle was not too surprising, but then for a pittance they let us buy a couple of large shots anyway.

We took a taxi back into town where we had to swing by the CT scan clinic to pick up the written report for Sarah and wandered into Bridgetown to buy a couple of phones with Caribbean sim cards (15 pounds each including 5 pounds of credit!) and have some lunch. Lunch involved queuing up for a buffet arrangement, but there was no information about what to do etc. and so we joined up with the three Bajan ladies in front of us and quizzed them which turned out to be a shrewd move as they were very helpful and seemed to get us special attention from the staff. All very relaxed and we were very impressed by how much food the locals could pile on a single small plate at the buffet itself.

We then made our rather unsteady way back out to the anchorage to find that Sarah had been beavering away doing loads of jobs in my absence! Oops!

The collective plan to visit a district known as Oistins for a local fish supper etc was postponed until Saturday for some reason......

We sent the CT scan off to our wonderful Worcester GP in the evening, and she has offered to show it to Sarah’s original radiologist.   Her initial response to the report (at 11.30pm UK time – definitely above and beyond the call of duty – but put Sarah’s mind at rest in a very big way) was that all the excitement has been about old lesions relating to the endometriosis and Sarah’s hysterectomy ten years ago.   It was an entertaining report: having invited Sarah to bring any other information to the scan, she never saw a doctor or was interviewed, but the report  states “there appears to have been a hysterectomy” as if the fairies have been at work and Sarah might not have noticed!

On Saturday, Scott-Free and ourselves hosted Bob and Lynn who live here, to coffee and then lunch on board while we answered their many questions about how we had set the boats up and other issues relating to long distance cruising as they plan to follow in our footsteps so to speak before too long as they have a yacht in Marmaris.

In the evening the four of us went off to Oistins to see the fish market, sample the rum punches, fish suppers and generally soak up the atmosphere of this predominantly Bajan area. Our taxi driver out there (Corrie) was very genial and like so many others, was keen to tell us all about everything we were seeing as we drove along. Once there we wandered through the market and amongst all the stalls, bars and ‘restaurants’. Actually it was all great fun and the bigger enterprises had big BBQ’s and were churning out various species of fish cooked to varying degrees of incineration. After some beers in one bar and some rum punches in another, we ended up sitting down at ‘Pat’s place’ and all had great, but very spicy BBQ fish dishes, Sarah sampling the local delicacy of flying fish and declaring it well worth the fuss.

We decided to return to Bridgetown in one of the Government buses as recommended by the taxi driver earlier, but after a fair old wait we changed our minds and jumped into one of the frequent minibuses which operate just like the Dolmus in Turkey: you just jump aboard  as it slows down and squeeze into any available space and hurtle off down the road. Steve appeared to be sat next to an interesting chap, but it later turned out that he was just blind drunk and so Steve never actually made out anything the chap slurred at him! Sarah, Chris and myself were in the very back seats and were able to enjoy watching the comings and goings as the minibus picked up and dropped off locals along the way. In the end, to our relief it dropped us off right by the dinghy and all for the princely equivalent 75 pence each. Transport and entertainment included.