Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Out Of Touch

Yachts to the left of us... 
...and yachts to the right of us.
So, we're here in Bonaire, one of a long line of yachts moored off the main (only?) town.

The land is - just there - right over our bow. Close enough that I can easily hear the excellent live music being played on the weekends.

Elias and mate, off for a snorkel
But even though we are only 150 meters or so from land, it's now more than a week since I set foot in the dirt. And that last foray was just a quick dash to illicitly stuff a bag of our trash into a dumpster.

My last real land experience, a classic sailor's afternoon of cruising various shops for things that might be persuaded to work as boat parts, was ten days or so ago.

I find that I'm liking this all-aquatic existence.

Bonaire is a perfect place to get your exercise in the water. Every day I swim, usually for an hour or so, down the row of yachts and back.

The boys take recess from school every morning by jumping off the boat into the water about a hundred times in a row. I take a break from my research grant proposal writing and join them.

We pretty regularly take Galactic to one of the dive moorings around the island for a session of family snorkeling.

Elias is learning to scuba dive. Eric has suddenly gone from being a very poor, very reluctant swimmer to being one of those half-fish/half-boy creatures that you see growing up on traveling sailboats. And today Elias and his 8-year-old mate from Jadean took our inflatable, Smooches, and went off on an adult-free snorkeling safari.

True, it came to a premature end because Elias cannot always get the outboard started. But I love to see him and other kids off doing stuff on their own.

So for now, as I toil away at the science salt mines, and we occasionally grumble about the Caribbean, and how it's nothing like our beloved Pacific, we look up and realize that we've got about the best thing going that we could wish for.

An evening swim. Eric is still light enough to bodily throw off the boat. 

Why do they make kids' drawstrings so long, anyway?

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