37.16.422N 9.52.817E

Friday:

The little black cat is still determined to join the Wandering Dragon crew. Koshka seems quite happy with him/her, he warns off all the other cats except this one. He’s probably thinking it will be a replacement for Yoyo. Yoyo, thinking it may be her replacement, keeps a good watch out and scares the little black cat away.

Once again we have been in one place too long. The locals are now teaching us Arabic as we walk past them. Going into town now involves a 10 minute lesson. We have learnt how to say “hello” and “I’m good” and forgotten it by the time we returned back home to the boat. We dread the test tomorrow.

The wind calmed a little on Thursday but is now blowing again, albeit not as bad as before. We need a few days of low wind for the sea state to calm down a bit, otherwise we have a choppy uncomfortably passage to our next port. As you can probably gather by now, we don’t do choppy uncomfortable passages if we can help it.

Saturday:

Stephen managed to badly bend his glasses a few days ago. We decided that it would be better to pay an optician than try and repair them ourselves as they were twisted in two different ways. We found an optician and showed her the problem. She phoned somebody up, then went outside and waved her arms. The person she was waving at was the optician, he came into the shop and fixed the glasses. Best of all he didn’t charge us anything.

We visited our favorite patisserie again and otherwise had a relaxing day reading (again).

Sunday

We were woken at 7am by the police and immigration seeing off the boat next door. Unfortunately they were not very quiet. After our forced early morning wake up call, we started on the backlog of washing. The good news is most things dry in about an hour due to the wind and heat.

We also cleaned the boat as sand is getting everywhere as it blows in the wind.