Monday 20th January 2025
This morning we headed to Jolly Harbour to “hopefully” meet up with our friendly lady in the tour office and also to reconnoitre where the dive-boat leaves from as Martin has booked a two-dive boat trip and it has an 0800hrs start time tomorrow, hence our “reconnoitre”
Again upon arrival our “friendly lady” made us most welcome and to add you “our” comfort switched on her air-con. We were enquiring about a catamaran that takes about 20-people and does snorkelling day trips to the reef and serves lunch. We “eventually” came out of there having agreed to charter a catamaran for just the three of us with Captain Simon, the same fellow who owns the monohull we chartered when Captain Charlotte was on the helm the previous week with Lee and Sarah. This happened after we had explained they need to improve their food offer: Watch this space!!!
Having been “seduced” by our friendly lady, we decided lunch at home would be more appropriate so headed back. En-route our snack lunch had turned out to be our main meal of the day so stopped off at the local supermarket for some “bits-n-bobs” to enable Christine to cook an excellent lunch.
In between all our activities we have been in contact with a specialist tour operator in South Africa as we are planning a visit there in December so after lunch did some more research. We had decided to visit Runaway beach later in the afternoon and stay to watch the sun go down.
At the appropriate time we headed the beach, a one mile trip that takes at least 5-minutes!!! Again we found our special spot under the trees, next to a wooden table that has seen better days and established our “beach-head”; this is the same table we commandeered last time with Sarah and Lee but today we were brave, we moved it further onto the beach to be in the sun; a daunting task knowing how much maintenance it needs!!! Anyway we moved it in one piece but sat on it with “caution”.
As usual the sea was excellent and the beach empty as we enjoyed several alcoholic beverages accompanied by nibbles trying to watch the sun going down, but thwarted as clouds appeared😡😡. Have to try again another day.
It was dark when we drove back home and the usual pot-holes were harder to spot, so our 5-minute journey took 10-minutes!!!
Whilst sitting on our verandah the price of being on the beach at dusk was becoming evident, both Christine and Martin were scratching and applying “Aloe-Vera” and other creams to calm their bites, fortunately I’m on a course of B12 so was un-affected 😂😂. The thing is, we thought it was mozzies but now wonder if it was sand flies as the bites became bigger; even the extra alcohol didn’t help!!!
Off to bed later with them scratching even bigger looking bites; oh dear what sort of night will we have???? Tomorrow we have to be away at 0715hrs in time for Martin’s appointment with the dive boat which means an alarm, unheard of on our holidays