Karl & Kara Go Sailing

Sunday 22 nd September, Port Louis, Mauritius. Wow. That was a bit of an overwhelming arrival. And I haven't even stepped ashore yet. We seem to have arrived back at real, proper civilisation for the first time since Darwin – over two months ago. As we came in to the port we saw buildings more than two floors high, in fact, several floors high. There's lots of ships, big fishing boats, port buildings, a helicopter!.  We seem to have located the entire Chinese fishing fleet - that's just one row of them. We're tied up now at the immigration/customs dock awaiting the completion of formalities. Right beside us people are eating lunch outside restaurants, there's a bar, there are loads of people, hotels, traffic, a McDonald's!  As we came in to tie up people were taking our photo instead of taking our lines (thankfully a nice coastguard officer was there to take the lines). There's the makings of some sort of live music being se

Thursday 12 th September, L'Ile Rodrigues, Mauritius. We made it! We arrived on Monday morning, wiggled our way through the channel in the surrounding coral reef and tied up at a great big dirty dock at the distinctly deserted commercial port. What a sleepy little town, we thought. Later we realised we'd arrived on a special public holiday for the Pope's visit. So we sat aboard (not allowed leave the port until all formalities have been completed) waiting for all the necessary officials to be rudely recalled from their day off while listening to the Pope's arrival on the local (in French! So exotic.) radio station.  Grainne at the dock and the port to ourselves. Eventually a lovely health officer came aboard to confirm neither of us were dying or infectious. Then he walked us down to the immigration officer in his little office at the port. Then we went back to the boat to wait for the two lovely police/coastguard officers who came to do their

Saturday 31 st August, somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Last day of Winter and we seem to have avoided it completely this year, yay. Like migrating birds. We left Cocos last Saturday after soaking up a final bit of deserted beach and beautiful snorkelling.  We tried a snorkelling spot at the end of the beach called “The Rip” which is, well, a very strong rip current. You get in and get scooped, whoooosh, past a wall of coral and loads of fishlife. Like a David Attenborough underwater clip on fast forward. And then you get spat out at the far end with a great big grin on your face and a childish urge to go straight back and do it again. So much fun.  A gentle snorkel, not at The Rip. The Catalan family left a couple of days before us so they had everyone over for a farewell dinner which was lovely and included such luxuries as ice-cream from their freezer (they have a way fancier boat than Gráinne, imagine, a freezer of all things!). And th