11th August

We arrived safely at 9pm on Thursday night and found Yrumoar still happily tied up to her mooring. We woke up early on Friday and discovered we had cockroaches on the yacht. Now, when we first moved on board we knew there were roaches, but after much roach killer and numerous traps we thought we had solved our problem…alas we had not!

We decided that breakfast on the yacht was out of the question and packed all food items into the fridge, placed good old Fumitabs around the boat and set them alight. We locked the door and left for the mall. Rauen mentioned that maybe machine guns weren’t good enough to win our war, but our nuke was bound to work! (sadly we found a lone roach when we were leaving – roaches do survive nukes!) We will be back at war when we return in September.

We decided that Breakfast at Maxi’s was a plan, followed by a little shopping for our supplies. We returned to the boat with arms full of goodies at 2pm. We then managed to get our new yacht membership cards from the yacht. We are now officially members of ZYC and can now officially apply for Yrumoar's name change! Barry and I spent the afternoon cleaning all the cupboards, shelves and floors in the yacht…great start to a long weekend.

Saturday morning dawned bright and we decided to take a sail. It was Dean’s first trip to the ocean, first time on a yacht and it was great fun to see things through his eyes.

 He asked a load of questions and enjoyed himself tremendously. We first took a short trip around the harbour, then exited through the washing machine into the deep blue yonder, much to Kyle’s horror…

(this face makes me feel awful about taking Kyle with on this adventure – I am such a terrible mother!)

When we got back to the marina, the boys went down to the yacht club to play soccer while Barry and I emptied the fore deck lockers. The front one was empty (we have now put the shade cover in this one). We are trying to keep the weight closest to the middle of the boat. There was so much stuff in the second locker, we just kept coming up with more and more every time we entered into the depths of this enormous locker. We managed to get everything sorted and took a whole heap of things up to the storeroom. We now have a whole heap of things we want to fit to this locker, but first we want some hooks, brackets and the like to ensure we maintain an important boat philosophy: “A place for everything and everything in its place”.

Goodies from the locker

On Sunday morning, I called my dad to ask if there was NEWS about the looming teachers strike. He said that he had received a letter stating that the kids would be safer at home….great! That literally meant an extra day (and an extra long weekend). We decided that to celebrate we would take a hike to the beach.

It was a little over 3 km’s each way and we took a walk, playing soccer on the way and a dip in the ocean followed by ice-cream before the long hike back made the day complete. We also managed to find a bucket and spade for Kyle to play on the “beach” at the yacht club with…we will spend many hours building sandcastles in the future.

Once we got back from the hike, Barry and I went up to the yacht club to catch the end of the Hobie cat racing taking place there. Neither of us have any idea about the rules and after a while decided that a good, hot shower and an early night would be more fun.

On Monday we woke up to the dreaded South Westerly blowing like crazy, it was overcast, windy and cold…guess we can’t have glorious weather everyday.

We decided to read the book I had brought with, this is one of the books we received for the home- schooling programme and we spent the day reading, analysing and discussing the themes, characters and plot. We also spoke about the use of grammar to create mood and many parts of speech…it all went well and the kids even commented that I managed to make English interesting. The book was also a great read, why not try it yourself? Tribes by Cathrine Macphail.(You can get it through the Kalahari link on the right)

On Tuesday we took the long drive home, after struggling to carry the bags to the car on a marina swamped with waves and moving like a roller coaster. Even the birds could not fly into the pumping, howling wind as a small wild bird eventually landed on my shoulder and allowed me to take him from the marina walk-on up to the more sheltered boatyard.

All in all, a successful weekend which had all the aspects of a fantastic holiday and a great school education, hopefully this glimpses of what we can expect in the future. We even did geography on the way home while playing our near famous countries game.