Well all right!

Moonlight Serenade

Friday, August 17
Coral Cove Marina

It is WAAAAY past cruisers' midnight (9 pm) here in Chaguaramas Bay, but Jeff and Una from s/v Dragonfly have arrived back in the marina, and we haven't spent time with them since the "wine tasting" (read 'cheap wine guzzling') held aboard s/v Crossroads in Martinique in early June. That night was a lot of fun, so we expected more of the same once they returned.

Tonight started innocently enough, with a meager bottle of red wine that we brought over to share while we watched Jeff's slideshow featuring the last ten months of his cruise. We polished off the bottle and broke into Jeff's rum for a glass or two before he brought out the scary stuff--Tennessee moonshine. Serious stuff with no FDA approval.

Speaking of which, I have really reaped the benefits of cruising in a foreign land earlier this week, when I stretched a muscle in my shoulder...just...too...far while clamboring off Delilah. I felt something in my back go twang, and though, in previous years, a good night's sleep would usually heal a pulled muscle, nowadays, a good night's sleep has no effect, and my back feels even worse in the morning. Advil, shmadvil.

Fortunately, the next day was market day, followed by a short stop at an American-style grocery store. So after lugging around several bags of produce for an hour, I was glad to see a pharmacy.

Here in Trinidad, there is no pesky FDA to control what makes it out into the marketplace. All I had to do was tell the nice man behind the counter my symptoms, and presto, I had a thirty pack of Beserol, made in Colombia (!!!), and a few scant lines of directions for use. Beserol is part acetominophen and part methocarbamol, whatever that is. The directions on the package state, "The mechanism of action of methocarbamol in humans has not been established," meaning, "We don't know why it works, but it does, so dose up!" They were right; it worked. I took only one, and I was sanding teak that afternoon.

But let's go back to the moonshine. I have, actually, tasted moonshine before, but just a little of it, and some peaches had been soaked in it to help it go down. I was surprised by how smooth this stuff was. It went down way more easily than some of the local rums we've tried. And before I knew it, Jeff and Dean were heavily into solving some unsolvable math equation while Una and I discussed the importance of logistical skills in solving Soduku puzzles. In other words, we were all three sheets to the wind. I just hope it rains again tomorrow so we don't have to work too hard.

Of course we have been doing some very serious and strenuous maintenance on the boat for the past month, but it's way too boring to retell.