Wednesday, March 28, 2012

We have been playing musical boats the last few days.  We are in a military port and 2 days ago at the drop of the hat we were told we had to move to let a huge tug  go out.  We were attached to shore by three lines, one starboard, one port and one aft as well as to our anchor.  We had to untie all 3 lines and then pull up the anchor, all the while trying not to run into the boats on either side of us.  We then went around and around in circles in the harbour  until the tug had left.  We were given a little more notice the second time and were told we could tie up in another section of the harbour if we chose.  All the lines were untied and we motored to the other side of he harbour and tied up again.  Today the wind changed directions and our boat drifted in to the floating plastic dock behind us.  Our neighbour boat thought we were dragging anchor so untie all the lines, pull anchor to discover his anchor was over top of ours, so he had to untie all his lines and get his anchor out before we could reset ours.  What a smoze!  Hopefully we can stay put for a few days in this location and the swell doesn't get too big, because it gets uncomfortable in this spot if there is a large swell.  
I was going to do a blog about the food in Sri Lanka but the pictures won't load so I will save it for another day. The English cricket team is in town and are playing a 5 day test match against the Sri Lankans.  There are supposedly about 8,000 extra Englishmen in town to watch the games so it is really busy downtown.  Barry and I did not want to spend the $35.00 each to watch in the stadium but if we went up to the ramparts of the Galle fort we could catch some of the actions.  We spent about 2 hours watching.  The vendors were in full force but rather than the peanuts, popcorn we usually here in North America, the cry here was watermelon, pineapple, water but universal and especially welcomed in the heat was "cold beer"!