Monday, April 21, 2008

Chinese New Year Feb 2008, Hong Kong

Well, last year I had my quick trip back to the UK so missed most of the biggest festival in the Chinese Calendar….and this year we were both ill for a fair bit of it! But I did get to see the decorations springing up as soon as January arrived. Some places added or altered their Christmas displays, but many had completely new stuff - theres even special tinsel with the tiny lucky gold ancient coins in it!


It was going to be the Year of The Rat, not that you could tell – most showed very cute little mice and Disney must have been doing their nut as Mickey was plagiarised EVERYWHERE. Pine trees were replaced with orange bushes bearing fruit (well, satsuma sized oranges anyway) and fake or real plum (?branches with small pink, purple or white) blossom trees.
Lucky money was displayed everywhere, lai-see envelopes (Red packets of money – often new notes in lucky amounts - given to children/ unmarried by the married and elders)
were handed out (empty!) with most purchases, and hung as decorations too. Officially it starts on the 1st of the 1st Lunar month of the Chinese calendar, and ends with the Lantern festival on the 15th, but many places seems to stay shut from New Years onwards! So it was the start of Feb this year.


According to legends, Chinese New Years started with the fight against a beast called the "Year" in Chinese. It ate villagers! They persuaded a great lion spirit to help, which wounded and drove away the beast. The next year the lion was protecting the Emperor's palace so defenceless people built a statue resembling it, using bamboo and cloth, which again scared off the monster and started the lion costumes off.


One day I had gone grocery shopping in Aberdeen and noticed a huge crowd gathering in the main square. A troupe of dancers was just starting, and as I was fairly tall for the audience I got a great view! I’d seen dragon dances in the UK, with the people under the costume snaking along the streets, but this was a lion dance.

They had their own drummers so it was a great racket.
After a rhythmic dance with a lot of the guys under the costume, they left just 2 in it, front and back, who then climbed onto a series of poles well over 6 feet above the ground which the rest of the group steadied for them.

They then did the most amazing acrobatics for a good 10 minutes, leaping from 1 pair of poles to others, all the time keeping up a brilliantly life-like lion act. It blinked and wagged its tail, washed itself, batted its eyelashes, pounced like a cat – it was really fantastic!
The finale was it spitting as banner (saying happy New Year, I expect), sweets and multicoloured short spirals of confetti onto the crowd. After they climbed down they toured the edge of the performance space, but I couldn’t see if that was to collect tips or be patted by the kids. Then a different dancer climbed a big pole several stories high, in another lion costume.
A strong man down the bottom hooked a long pole into the tail end of the lion and manipulated that from the ground, while the soloist did more cat-acting and acrobatics, spinning round the tip of the pole, ending with another colourful shower.

Absolutely brilliant! Some families invite a lion dance troupe to their homes or business to usher in the Lunar New Year and evict bad spirits. Apparently different lion troupes used to compete to ‘eat’ cabbages hung on high (so they became acrobats), the winner being paid!


On the days before the New Year celebration Chinese families give homes a thorough cleaning to sweep away last year’s bad luck and make homes ready for good luck. (They hide brooms on New Years Day so that new good luck cannot be brushed away.) Some give homes, doors and windowpanes a new coat of red paint or decorate them with paper cutouts of Chinese auspicious phrases and couplets. I haven’t bought any more of the tissue cut pictures as they fade so fast, and out here, go mouldy, but I adore the little stuffed, embroidered & tassled decorations all the street stalls sell.
Very colourful and quite cheap – shame as means slave labour somewhere in china, I expect.

They don't really do cards as such (though I found some) but a lot of the lai-see envelopes are tiny ones dangling from or attched to the back of elaborate 3-D paper concoctions, all of citrus fruit and flowers.

Chinese New Cards, Hong Kong
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.




The biggest event of New Year's Eve is the family dinner. A fish dish is displayed, like our Christmas dinner centrepieces/ main course. A lot of windows had the most amazing sweets, out of sticky rice or jelly, I think, that looked like real ornage & white coi carp. Then some go to temples to pray for a prosperous new year; but now many have parties and a countdown to the new lunar year. We stayed in as we really didn’t fancy battling the crowds and it was actually pretty cold! Instead we took advantage of the fact it’s the only time of year the club at Middle Island is closed (at the club HQ volunteer European sailing staff and members run the bar!) so we moored both our boats there to fill up their water tanks and use power tools on them.



New Years Day is for welcoming the deities of the heavens and earth, beginning at midnight. Avoiding eating meat ensures longevity, and lighting fires or using knives is bad luck, so all food is cooked the day before. (Though every café and restaurant we passed seemed to have queues of families booked in for banquets so they must have been cooking!). Families visit their oldest and most senior members. New clothes, shoes and haircuts are usually worn to signify a new beginning- so lots of shops have their New year sales just before the holiday.

We went to Pizza Hut (oooh) in Repulse Bay and were rather un-impressed by the special New Years pizza full of baked abalone and oysters they were trying to sell us all. Yik.


Fireworks and firecrackers are traditional, but like Hong Kong, many regions have banned as the number of fires around New Years challenged the fire departments. We could actually hear (and see smoke clouds & occasional flashes), the huge government display (which was on in the main harbour) from our boat, all the way over the mountains!


The second day of the New Year, married women visit their parents, and everyone prays to ancestors and gods.

Temple, Aberdeen, HK
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.

They give extra food and love to dogs, as that day is the birthday of all dogs.


The third and fourth day of the Chinese New Year are generally accepted as bad days to visit relatives and friends as it is thought to be easy to get into arguments. (From too much fried food and visiting during the first two days). Hmm, sounds like something more people should avoid/ do after Christmas too! The third day is for grave-visiting instead and we saw lots of people going to ‘proper’ grave yards, or the unofficial Chinese ones dotted around slopes everywhere, clutching greenery and things to burn.
I noticed all the big fishing boats had their prow alter displays of greenery renewed/ blessed too. This is another time of year the government get very twitchy, as everything is bone dry after no rain for months, and people leave burning objects and incense sticks on the graves…..



The seventh day, the common man's birthday, is when everyone grows one year older. People get together to toss a colourful raw fish salad and make wishes for continued wealth and prosperity. The ninth day Chinese offer prayers and sugarcane to the Jade Emperor of Heaven as it’s his birthday. I still haven’t tried sugar cane (not that I should eat it, being diabetic – but I had it when we were kids in Belize) but you see it on sale in street stalls a lot, or ready to be made into drinks as you watch.


The fifteenth and last day of the New Year, rice dumplings, and Tangyuan a sweet glutinous rice ball brewed in a soup, are eaten. Candles are lit outside houses to guide wayward spirits home. As it’s the Lantern Festival, families walk the street carrying lighted lanterns. Like I saw last year they really have the most massive, impressive lanterns, our Halloween efforts are pitiful! Still hate the all-singing all flashing twirling plastic ones a lot of the kids get bought, yuk! One of the street stalls that usually sells odd dried things (beans & nuts?) and sweets was doing a roaring trade in special seasonal biscuity looking things, so I got a selection to try – well I pointed at a few and the lady chattered away in Cantonese and gave me a mix bag of the entire selection. Pete and I ate in MacDonalds (for a treat and all the normal local cafes’ restaurants were inundates with booked parties) so got to see the Year of the Rat packaging Mac Ds were selling, and free Lai see envelopes!
Then we tried the biscuity things. The one in the shape of the traditional old coins was IMPOSSIBLE to bite, I thought I’d broken another tooth!
Sort of a fossilised pastry/ shortcake flavour. The ball with the red nobbly end was worse,
though filled with sesame seeds.
We gave up and tried the shortcake (peanutty) back at the Middle Island bar, when Billy the barman saw us attempting the other bits and came running over to correct us – most of them are meant to be heated! It did make the ‘tough’ ones almost edible but can’t say I’d bother again!
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Friday, February 08, 2008

A Life on the Ocean Waves. Not. Loving boat living?

I don’t know if I ever actually described life on the boats/ practical stuff here!


Water.
Sherilee is basically a survival pod, Pete says – wind generator, ancient solar panels (that we think don’t work and will maybe replace if we ever go sailing in her again), equally ancient inherited stores of rice etc (I chuck a sack whenever I notice bugs have got in – we hardly cook and the containers just decay I think. I picked up a pack of Red Bull cans Pete bought a few months ago and the bottom just detached on all of them – the humidity & salt here, I suppose!).


And the watermaker. I have just been switching off on learning boaty things –I have no interest whatsoever and for once have let it be a bit sexist and left Pete to all that. Part of it is in the inner side kitchen cockpit seat, the rest you have to crawl under the back of the cat hull and turn on. Pete has been trying to get hold of some special gunge to coat the membranes in so we don’t have to run it every week (more in hot weather) to preserve it safely, but no joy. Until we moved out this week and discovered a tin of it had been left by the previous owner and buried by our gear when we moved IN! As it is after both of us getting ill (when I ended up in hospital) possibly from drinking water stored in the boat tanks, which we fill by driving it up to the jetty and using Middle Island’s mains hose, we usually boil any water before drinking it. I did boil water even when we had the flat – it’s supposed to be OK but was odd different colours sometimes so I want convinced. I did ask how/ if water tanks got cleaned when we were looking at the cat originally and got fobbed off! On the new boat we stick to bottled water which is a pain – Pete can get 2 big 1.5 l bottles free a day as his drink allowance but quite often we forget. We are looking for ways to sterilise both boats tanks and start afresh so to speak. What is bliss is you don’t have to use a foot pump to get water on NB – it has an electric motor so its almost like real taps, yay!


When it rained (ALL SPRING& SUMMER) on Sherilee, we attach special hoses to bits that hang down from the brown biminy (shade/ rain cover thing over the wooden deck) and collect as much rainwater as we can from that. We don’t drink it as the pollution here sucks – the rain turns newly washed white boats grey very quickly! Not sure if we can figure out a collection sheet on naught Boy but I’d like to get at least plastic sheets to line the back deck so we can sit out if we want – and hopefully help reduce dripping noise/ the leak we just found in the ceiling of our cabin! (I will work out how to fix it once I have worked out how to take up the wooden deck covering fibreglass which makes the floor/ ceiling – its screwed and glued down in strips but the screws are covered in wooden plugs I can’t move). By the way, its fairly impossible to sleep when its raining on a boat – even if the bed hatches on Sherillee / the ceiling in NB didn’t leak, the noise gets you. Its like being in a caravan I suppose…….gentle rain might sound relaxing but we don’t get that here!


Electricity
Sherilee had mini tube lights either side of the main hatches, and random small dome lights switched on with a little peg on their rim dotted around the cabins. Just enough to read by but not much else. NB has bigger square lights protruding from the ceiling in most rooms, quite dim, worked by annoying rocker switches on their edge. The bedroom has the same domed lights as Sherilee but some are also worked by a (gasp!) real light switch at the door. At some point we will be re-wiring stuff and putting in brighter bulbs that can run off the batteries.


Pete just swapped the wind generator from the catamaran onto the top deck of NB. Brilliantly when he unscrewed the swivel chair thing up there the win gen's pole fitted the hole perfectly! we also think the solar panels on the cat may not be as dead as we thought as the batteries on it are now TOO full, I'll have to start going over there occasionally to waste some electricity from them!
He did a bit of a bodge, running the wire down through a window which now has to stay open a crack (they slide along lengthways and close nearest the back door) but hopefullly it will stop us running flat like we did last week.


Food.
Well, you know we had no fridge on the catamaran – the funny drop in box thing had died years ago, and had to be cooled with blocks of ice that melted. There was no drain and you had to scoop out the melt water, plus food either floated in it or was wedged against the sloping sides in trays I tried to fit in….finding ants nesting in there was the final straw. I’m afraid I sprayed the thing and just put the top back on (it made up most of the ‘work surface’ in Sherilees kitchen space!) so lord knows what its like in there now. Ick. (On the plus side that seemed to be the end of the ants the catamaran came with – no sign of them since May!).


I usually shop in Park n Shop or Wellcome supermarkets as they have some western brands. types (eben if they are imported from the Phillippines/ Australia) and lots of branches. I have loads of fabric shopping bags now and lug it all onto the minibus and down the main steps, or all the way along the promenade from Repulse Bay's shop.

I kept my insulin in the fridge in the open room half full of sailing stuff by the jetty at the Middle Island Club. It’s really for the coxuns to keep their snacks in, as they eat lunch and hang around there when they are on ferry duty, but they don’t seem to mind. So every 2 days I/ Pete have to buy bread (which is usually sold in small packs of about 6 slices – like 1/3 of a loaf – I don’t know why!), cheese, veg, crackers and cereal. (Rcentl saw boxes of my favourite mini-shreddies cereal on sale for over UK5!!!! Not buying them there again!).It’s not too bad in winter but as I have said, other times its so hot even solid cheddar is mush after a few hours. Often the fruit & veg isn’t great quality – well, not by western standards anyway.
It is odd – some of the stuff like all sorts of apples, is polished and waxed so highly it looks like its made of china! Some supermarkets even stack special packs of wipes and ‘vegetable cleaner’ beside the apples, to take it all off again I suppose! The mini cherry tomatoes and sugar snap peas are far more battered and less regimented than what any UK shop (aside from an organic I suppose!) would offer, but from what I hear the poor starving farmers in the Philippines and China have to use loads of chemicals and artificial fertiliser to get even them….. That sort tends to go mouldy in a few hours too.


Everything I can I keep in Tupperware as it goes soft instantly in the humidity here – even dried spaghetti overnight. I also have those little moisture-removing boxes in every cupboard & hatch I can think of, much as I hate the chemicals/ waste, as even in the flat with the de-humidifier on, damp ruined stuff very fast.

Caroline donated us her wee 12v fridge which we have only run briefly – its sat on the sofa table in the new boat just now. It would only hold maybe cheese and a few bits of insulin but might be good when we sort the new electrics out.
The boat came with a reasonable domestic fridge too, but like the built-in-cooker, its useless to us, as it needs mains electricity. At the moment it’s taking up the floor beside the useless cooker, and the 2nd cooker is filling the space in front of the steps into the sitting/ kitchen, as we can’t decide whether we may use it if we manage to find a berth with power in summer.

Bathroom:
Well, our ‘head’ space has increased but not the actual loo – its still a tiny wee kid sized bowl! But at least you can now get on it without being wedged in. Think I will turn the triangular shower space (as its in the bow) beside it into a greenhouse or something, as we will never use it.

Entertainment
Board games (we love that spatial strategy tile game Tantrix), Sudokus (I have ‘lost’ the books on purpose as I was dreaming them), travel backgammon (I taught Pete and am now fed up of him wanting to play) and music on the car stereo when we were in Sherillee.

It is totally DVDs on the decaying DVD player now we are on NB, as I haven’t moved the games over yet. I only bought the mini player last spring but it’s a bit iffy – only the remote works and the slightest movement (especially the cat) starts it rewinding or switches it off. It is handy though – smaller screen than my laptop but it comes with a car adapter so we can plug it in on either boat. And it plays come music CDs too…


Sue/ I bought out a lot of our old DVD’s, and we did start buying VCD’s too. Then realise that though they cost UK2 max, they are sooo blurry and you have to switch cd’s in the middle of the film. A lot of DVDS are actually bootlegs, its quite hard to tell, and some ‘genuine’ admitted bootlegs are really good quality. So we sit on our actual soaf and watch them, yay.
One lot are making rather nice cheap box sets of all the UK sitcoms from Benny Hill to Cold Feet, and a lot of the USA imports too – medical, sci-fi, etc. I did get the new Dr Who’s (entire 2 series for15UKP rather than 15 UKP per 3 episodes) and all of Angel series 1-5 for about UK20. They have surprises though, suddenly missing off endings or changing to horrible unwatchable quality half way through. The blurbs and cover photos often bear no resemblance to the series and all of them seem to list extras (which of course they can’t copy onto the DVDs anyway!) for the ‘Lion King’ - ? The bootleg music CDs were worse – I did wonder why they had photos of Sandra Bullock the actress on one – they mistook her for the singer Shania Twain it seems!


Sleeping
You have heard me whine about the mini mattress in the flat and the coffin shaped & sized berth on the catamaran with its paper thin sponge pad…well, FINALLY a proper bed platform! Either the splinters off it (big bits of it lift out to access the crankshaft in its water puddle below) or the cat deflated the air mattress Brian very thoughtfully carried over from the Uk for us. (Good idea of Sues – to stop a mattress going mouldy like the pillows do). Plus even when we didn’t wake up resting on a thin rubber layer on the bare planks, the noise & bouncing/ sinking wasn’t liked much by either of us. So, a mattress hunt. I tried all the little local suppliers but even their ‘XXL’s’ kept out the back were too short for us/ the bed platform, so I ended up at Ikea. I bought a latex mattress as they think its better for the climate here – has 100’s of airing holes etc – with a small pad on top of it. Wow. The 1st comfy, long enough, wide enough bed we have had since reaching HK. HOORAY. I may actually sleep well now!


The cat loves the new bed, especially as its been so cold that we wear jumpers and hats to sleep in, and have the lovely down sleeping bags over the duvet too. AND she loves all the hiding spaces in the bilge, under cupboards, in walls - keep finding wee black paw prints everywhere!
Plus she can now run madly from one end of the boat to the other! Skidding on the rugs is her new best game too.
But NB is a much bigger, less waterproof/ airtight space then the skinny hulls on Sherilee. There, if the bed hatch was shut, I had covered the air vents with mosquito netting and made a screen to fit the main hatch doors too, so we were relatively unbitten. Here there are all sorts of cracks; there are sliding windows in all the rooms, which are a bit old and rattly and only 1 still has a sliding mozzie screen in.
Plus extra space means more hiding places for bugs that get in during the day. So after much searching I again hit Ikea & got 2 mosquito nets. Not the nice easy to use/ hang box shaped ones I found the best in Belize, but ones with a small hoop in the top. For show mainly…I clipped two together without the hoops and hung them from opposite ends of the bed, so we have the maximum space inside. I had to bodge ties onto the ceiling strips but it worked. Then the cat changes her habits – on Sherilee she refuses to move until we get up but here she roams at night. Queue lots of aborted leaps back onto the bed leaving her tangled in the nets, or panic digging into it to try to get back under our warm covers. She’s finally starting to get the hang of nudging in the opening on the ‘open’ side of the bed but forgets sometimes.


Daytime I twist and loop the net up and clip it near the ceiling so the bed is free of it. Then the mighty force of destruction called ‘Skitty Kitty’ comes into force. I don’t know how she does it but she detaches it all. That’s a lie, actually, frantic yowls and pinging last week meant I found she had leapt from the wall shelf onto the TOP of the net and been trapped as it all ripped and collapsed. So it’s now about 30% black duct tape over rips…..usually with her sat panting in the middle of it like some runaway bride.


I’ll miss the cat when its hot – she’s so cuddly just now. Even more noisy talking at you than usual but a lot of it is complaining she’s cold and wants you to get into the duvet/ blanket/ sleeping bad/ anything she can burrow into. Pete nearly had some painful accidents when she tried to get in his baggy warm PJ trousers with him…


Sleep itself depends on the weather a lot. It’s rarely flat calm (if it is its usually too hot and mosquito- ridden so their buzzing wakes me). I think I prefer the rocking movement on Sherilee, as on NB it is far more pronounced – the 2 hulls on the catamaran used to sort of wiggle and roll rather than tip. The last 2 days have been very queasy (Peter more than me) as the waves/ tide/ wind combine to rock side-to-side rather than front to back, yug. NB has no rattling ringing rigging or mast but there are lots more creaks and groans (its an old boat – I hope we can fix some of them!) and it swings around on the mooring more than Sherilee...plus the drips are bigger and noisier on NB. But then again the hatch that leaked on Sherilee's dripped into the middle of my back when we were there…




Daily stuff
We usually have cereal (made with milk powder and bottled water) for breakfast, sat on the sofa and when on the cat could also boil up a kettle. (Hope to have it out on our nice sheltered back deck when its warmer!).
We need to work out either how to get the domestic gas cooker on Naughty Boy fed off a big refillable gas tank (whole nightmare where regulations say the gas bottle has to be in a cupboard outside on the deck I think), or find a small safe gas stove that doesn’t use those stupid wasteful tiny gas bottles. I succumbed and bought one, its just a little flat burner for 1 pan really, but it was so cold this month, and out ‘kitchen ‘ (Middle Island’s restaurant!) shut for 4 days for Chinese New Year!
If we are having a special day (or guests) and it’s a holiday/ weekend, we get a nice cooked breakfast at Middle Island instead, but normal weekdays they don’t serve food until after noon. As I have said Pete gets a generous meal allowance equal to the massive buffet available at the HQ (with about 18 courses). As Middle Island doesn’t offer the buffet, it covers 2 normal meals so we often have at least 1 meal a day at whichever club he’s at. I’m really missing stuff like Shepherd’s or cottage Pie and even things like trifle (not a usual favourite) as the set menu choices get a bit boring and no-one does fresh peas or mash. But their steamed broccoli is great – lovely and green!


The cat generally dives back into bed or the sleeping bags on the sofa to stay warm, whether we stay onboard or not!

Pete then takes Pingu our dinghy over to the nearby steps if he’s working at the main club in Causeway Bay. We stopped anchoring it in Deep Water Bay by the jetty where we get the buses as someone stole the anchor – I think actually one of the speed boats must have got tangled in it and has to cut our line, as the dinghy was carefully tied up again nearby! If he’s lucky we can wave the coxun on duty (he swaps with the night security guard fairly early in the morning but is not actually supposed to start the ferry until after 10 am weekdays) and get a lift to the steps that way, but sometimes if we know we will be late home and will miss the last ferry, we still have to use Pingu. Pingu’s not happy at the moment – without the anchor to set to keep him from rubbing against the big boulders piled along the coastline he gets bashed & stranded by the tide. That or us dragging him off the rocks has made his very slow leak a rather fast one – most mornings he’s got several inches of water throughout now and I have to bail like mad! Fixing that is on our list – I bodged patches and reinforced the edges but couldn’t buy marine glue so it’s a mix of contact adhesive and aquarium sealer. Think it may be the actual bung that leaks now….


Anyway, he/ we (if I’m going to) meander along the ‘Seaviw Promenade’ avoiding all the Phillipino maids walking their owners (mainly posh expensive big breeds with even the Labradors wearing raincoats) dogs,
and the joggers, and the fisherman casting without checking there is no-one behind them,
and get a taxi or minibus from the lay-by at the top of a short flight of steps. It can be hard to get into town before 10 a.m., from the lay-by as all the taxis will be full from Stanley, ditto the minibuses. If Pete’s in a hurry we climb the 200+ steep concrete steps directly in front of where we get off the ferry instead. As long as its not summer and we aren’t carrying stuff. He reckons its faster but as I tend to want to vomit by the time I get up then I can’t agree. But at the top of the 200 steps is a proper bus stop where mini-buses AND proper big buses will stop, so there is more choice for destinations.

We take the minibus to the stop with the golden dragon just outside Aberdeen tunnel, opposite the Jockey Club Race Track, and get a taxi to the club from there as Pete hates the huge jam of crowds in the morning. He usually showers at the club (they have nicer changing rooms & free towels at this main one) before he starts work. If I’m not working, I hang out in a little room off the big round sitting room attached to the bar. Quite often it’s deserted all day, but if a meeting or function closes the main room it gets busy. Its always freezing too – in summer I have to bring a jumper and even now its cold I need to turn off their A/C all the time. Stupid!

The Midday Gun goes off with a bang nearby, and Pete’s office (there’s only ever 7 of them max) leave 1 on duty and get lunch either down I the main restaurant or brought up to the bar (as they are allowed to sit outside there but not downstairs for some reason).

Evenings we either eat there, at Middle Island,
get a takeaway from one of those two, or grab something in a café as we walk to the minibus. We did try just sandwiches or cereal for tea but I kept having hypos overnight, it didn’t suit my sugars. On Sherilee we cooked occasionally f it was cold enough, but the lack of space and having to wash up mainly in a bucket of salt water (I always did that in the day on deck) was not a great incentive. And the lack of fresh stuff – will have to see if that improves when we sort NB’s kitchen out.





Definite advantages;
The rent is peanuts, we pay a few hundred UK per month for the 2 moorings and the man who owns it putters round a few times a week checking everything is still attached.
The fact that at the end of our stay we will have something to sell – Johnny in Pete’s office pays a fortune, like most, for a flat smaller than the space we have on Naught Boy, and will gain nothing as he rent it.
The view – we could never afford to live in this area with this view any other way.
The lack of pollution (compared to the rest of HK at any rate!).
The lack of bugs – most flats are full of cockroaches, large spiders, poisonous centipedes (on the islands), ant nests etc. So far we are NOT. I do miss the house geckos but not their poos….
The peace and quiet – apart from weekends & holidays when all the jet-skiers, speedboats etc drive us mad. But then again we usually work on holidays so are not onboard.
Ease of transport (as long as Pingu is working) – usually its fairly easy to get to shore and we don’t have to worry about missing ferries! Unless we start very early or finish late – then hopefully we have Pingu….

My favourite has to be the commute. As longs as its dry its lovely. Especially at night –we get phosphorescence a LOT. All the anchor ropes sparkle and flash, and washing up in salt water was a firework display on Sherilee. Recently its been so bright our Pingu or the club ferry boats going past look like they are levitating on light like something out of Star Wars. Its SO cool. Still not managed a photo of it though!


So come and stay – being a 2 boat family now you, no longer get a bucket on a string but maybe even your own boat!


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