Paradise, in the form of a supermarket

Thursday 19 Mar, CY day 5: Mostly a leisure day, with three big achievements: good provisioning, received shipments, and upload new videos.

After breakfast we head ashore to the Kirk supermarket. As I suspected, Oana is smitten with the store within minutes of entering. It really is like being in the best of any UK or US supermarkets. Huge variety and top quality. It’s very tempting to go wild, but we restrict ourselves to essentials only…. plus a few goodies. Prices are like USA plus 20%. So not cheap, but definitely cheaper than Bahamas. Long story short, we really feel like we have landed in paradise! Our treats include salmon, streaks, gourmet cheeses, and hot-cross-buns 🙂

Back on Cloudy, dark clouds appear and we get some welcome rain. Welcome because we are getting some building dust blown on us from a nearby site, not to mention the odd direct hit by bird poo! So good to get a wash off.
While Oana packs the shopping away, I nip ashore in search for internet signal and passwords. The nearby dive shop and LobsterPot restaurant both give me passwords but while we can connect from the boat (using our WiFiBAT booster) we are too far away to get any decent bandwidth. We are kind of getting desperate to upload the next videos to our YouTube channel.

Mid afternoon we head ashore in search of our shipments. We find them waiting for us at the customs office. Brilliant. That’s a relief. And best yet, being addressed to “yacht in transit” there is zero duty to pay. Same as Gibraltar. But here, the customs officer needed to watch us take the packages into the dinghy and leave the harbour towards the yacht. Like everything on this island, they are both efficient and thorough.

It’s fun opening packages. Seems ages since we’ve had any deliveries. One is new bladders for my large kite – which I found leaking in Bahamas. The other is Empirbus parts. Another Hallberg Rassy 54, Popsy, had removed their entire Empirbus system and gone back to standard wiring with breakers. Good news for us though, because they kindly sold us their entire system. I had it sent to Empirbus (now owned by Garmin) in Sweden where they checked it all out. So we now have a 100% backup. Very comforting to have this, given the whole boat electrics hangs on this system working correctly.

On the way back to Cloudy we took a quick dinghy trip to the beginning of the Seven Mile Beach, looking for somewhere we could tie up the dinghy when we decide to have a beach day.

Later on, we again head back ashore, this time with PC. We manage to get good WiFi sitting next to the dive shop under LobsterPot restaurant. We are very relieved when we manage to upload 2 videos in just over 2 hours. So, we are on a free mooring ball in vivid blue water; only a 200m dinghy ride to a good dock; 200m from an amazing supermarket; we have phone signal; and we know where to get good WiFi. What could be better?

In the evening we look at the local news and find that 2 of the 40 people tested on 13 March are positive. So that’s it, as we suspected, CV-19 is actually on the island. So probably just a matter of time before there is total lock down here too 🙁 Let’s see how this pans out.
Certainly on a communication side, the radio stations and broadcasts are superb. Very professional and thorough. We doubt even in Europe there would be such quality communication and sense that the authorities are totally on top of things. A large comfort in these rather troubling times.