What Day Is This?

Written by Pieter Jan on May 1, 2020 — 2 min read

From: Woburn Bay, Grenada
To: Grand Anse Bay, Grenada

What day is this? What month? Still 2020? At least still 2020, of that I’m quite sure. The days merge into one another like they have never done before.

The seasons seem to be changing slowly. Grenada has two seasons: wet and dry. The dry season is ending and the wet season will start next month. We’ve gotten a little more rain in the last week. At least, it makes for beautiful sunsets and keeps the boat clean.

Sunset after a rainy day
Sunset after a rainy day

Speaking of clean, one of my new hobbies during the lockdown is cleaning the hulls. It’s nasty work. It involves diving under the boat repeatedly, scraping off barnacles with a scraper, brushing off seaweed with a stiff brush, holding on to a suction pad and getting dragged through the water by the moving boat.

The little shrimp and crabs living between the weeds don’t take kindly to the destruction of their habitat and fling themselves at me with reckless abandon. Cleaning one hull takes the better part of an hour. After a week, the growth is back. Repeat.

Luckily, there’s ocean tv while cleaning. Curious fish come take a look, attracted by the kamikaze shrimp. A stingray glides past on the sea floor. Those things make it worthwhile. Until you cut your finger on a barnacle.

Tools of the trade
Tools of the trade

As for the rest, we’re still stuck in paradise limbo. We have our daily swim, but not much else in the way of outside entertainment. That and grocery shopping.

Things would be easier if people just accepted that yes, life expectancy has just gone down a bit, and carry on. It has been going up for the last century, so we’re still ahead.

Sitting inside for weeks on end is not living. After all, it’s not the years in your life that count, but the life in your years.