16 February 2006
Bahia Santiago
It started with a sore throat on my birthday. Now I'm beginning to get over my cough and congestion, but John's coming down with the same thing. Yesterday morning we dinghied ashore, walked out to the highway, and took the bus to Comercial Mexicana (one of the big U.S. style super market chains) with Joe and Cindy from Maggie Drum. Other than a delicious Valentine's Day lasagna dinner and pinochle on MD, it was the first time I'd left the boat since my birthday in Barra. We shared a taxi all the way back to the dinghies with our groceries so the trip itself wasn't particularly arduous, but the highly air-conditioned hike up and down the store aisles probably didn't do us any good. It's a good thing I bought another jumbo box of Kleenex! We've heard from boats now making their way north after SailFest that a similar bug made its way through the Zihuatenejo fleet.
We saw quite a bit of fog early yesterday, and when we woke up this morning the anchorage was socked in. We suppose this must be due to the colder water temps we noticed on our way down from Barra. It's 72 degrees here in the anchorage, but we logged 67 offshore at one point. This is quite a change from just a few weeks ago, but not a problem now since we won't be doing any snorkeling until we're feeling better.
I think being ill is the hardest thing about living on a boat, and it's even harder when you're cruising. Your "nurse" (the well partner) can't exactly hop in the car for cough drops, DVDs (thank you Maggie Drum for loaning us your collection!), soup, orange juice, and a People magazine to cheer you up. And with both of you cooped up on a small boat the lack of personal space will eventually make both parties testy, to say the least. The good thing is that it's harder to catch anything nasty out cruising because you have less exposure to germ carriers.
I forgot to mention that John stepped in a hole and took a hard fall on concrete around the same time I was catching my cold, and he now has a purple bruise the size of a cantaloupe on the outside of his thigh. A couple of days later he tripped and fell against a stanchion, so he has a matching (though smaller) bruise on the other thigh. Both of these falls were the result of things I did or didn't do so now I have three strikes against me (being the cause of his two spills and a cold) and am serving my time!
But the sun is shining, the days are warm (high 70's), the nights are cool (high 60's), the fish wake us up during the night bumping into the hull (big fish chasing little fish?), John's back into playing Pokemon Pinball on his Gameboy (he now owns a high score of 12 billion points), and I'm reading a wonderful novel that I will be sorry to finish ("Swimming" by Joanna Hershon).
Life is good!
Linda and John