Snow, mothballs and granny trolleys….. Domestic life afloat!
As you may have gathered, buying and keeping food has been a bit of a learning curve, not least working out what some things are and how to cook/eat them. Also summoning up the courage to use our beautiful tartan granny trolley (surprisingly no photos on this, though it was tempting when Steve and Rod of Charlotta were standing in Carrefour with their trolleys!). However it is essential at times particularly when stocking up on booze! (NB, this is our second one, the first collapsed under the weight of wine bottles from a French supermarket!) One enterprising supermarket in Martinique has its own dinghy dock, a bit like Sainsbury’s, except boats not cars…
Buying green papayas has been a disaster on both occasions – they go mouldy before they ripen -but then we learnt that they are also cooked and used as vegetables…. Similarly buying small green “bananas”and discovering they are more like plantains – they can only be compared to a mouthful of wallpaper paste (not that I’ve tried that!! ) – again, veg not fruit. We tend to buy as much as we can from markets, and to buy from a number of different stalls so more people get a little business. However, beware of handling their produce, as I was reminded when being severely reprimanded yesterday!
For those wondering what it is that hangs from the hoist for the outboard engine, it is the onions. They don’t mind frequent showers of rain and salt water, and it stops them from making the potatoes sprout. NEVER store loo rolls in nets next to pineapples – the snow that results has to be seen to be believed – and, yes, it does drift all over the boat!!
Getting rid of rubbish can be a challenge, though there is recycling on the French Islands. In Dominica, you are not allowed to bring ashore any rubbish, but it can be collected by a delightful man in his boat, which is decorated by Birds of Paradise flowers. In St Lucia recycling takes the form of people climbing in the skip to scout for Piton bottles to claim the deposit, though lately there are signs of limited sorting.
One of our worst horrors was when the washing went out to a local lady and came back damp and reeking of mothballs which had been lovingly deposited among our Tshirts and sheets! It took a day to get rid of the whiff which I thought had been consigned to memories of aged great grandparents!
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