Same Position As Yesterday

By the way, I forgot to credit Elan with discovering my error in the position earlier this week. When we checked in here at Baie De Taioa, I wrote 149 degrees West, when the actual Longitude was/is 140 degrees West. Oh well. Unlike the blog, I DO double check the GPS when I’m inputting nav data. So, thanks Elan, glad somone’s watching. My daughter Christine also tells us you are still updating our position on our Facebook pages, so thanks for that too.

And Jerry, you keep saying we should write a book. Well, if we do, your replies to our blog are going in it because they are more often than not hysterical. Thanks very much for the entertainment. We look forward to your comments.

OK, so on to today. Unfortunately for our readers, this wasn’t a very exciting day. Some of you may have noticed that we actually rarely have a quiet, boring day. Well, today we caught up with quiet and boring. Actually, it rained a lot today, so it was nice to be able to just hang out on the boat in this stunningly beautiful little bay. Ann did some more laundry (the bed sheets which take a lot of time) and I did some more miscellaneous boat projects. The more important project being our new privacy curtain that hooks to the lifelines around the cockpit. Now we can take a shower in the cockpit without the whole anchorage knowing or watching!

The Chicken Curry last night turned out great. Way cool to cook authentic Polynesian. As Ann wrote, we learned how to make coconut milk for the curry and conveniently had two coconuts on board. I cracked one (you use the back side of the machete not the sharp side) and scraped out the meat. Then mixed it with some water and squeezed it through some cheesecloth we had. Voila! (Bob is practicing his French!) The more authentic way is to squeeze it through coconut husk, but we didn’t have any. Just the nut. Also, after squeezing the scraped coconut, the Polynesians feed the result to their pigs. We also don’t have a pig. I made a ton of curry paste with the milk, curry, onion, etc and have enough for tomorrow night with some frozen shrimp we picked up. One last benefit of using the coconut- we’re about to sit down to some sliced coconut with Nutella. Yum!

OK, Ann said I had to give up my secret on how to harvest bananas so the future cruisers who are reading this will know. The big problem with getting a stalk of bananas in the wild is that they always grow about 15 feet in the air. You look up longingly and thin, “If I only had a ladder”. But, turns out you don’t need a ladder or even a fancy 15 foot long pole. I DO recommend you buy a machete because it’s incredibly useful in the tropics, but strictly speaking you can even do it with just a knife. The secret is that you cut down the whole tree the stalk is on. We watched a REAL Polynesian do it. It helps to weigh about 300 pounds like the gentleman who showed us. If you weigh less than 300 pounds, make deeper cuts into the tree (see below) Don’t worry about cutting down the tree, the banana tree needs to be cut down. It’s really more like a fern on steroids. A new stalk of bananas will only grow on a freshly cut tree so you’re doing it a favor.

So…now pay attention, you could get hurt if you do this wrong. You find a likely looking stalk. This will have about 100 still green bananas on it and it will be 15 feet or so above your head. It helps to have a couple friends who also want some bananas because they will pretty much all ripen at the same time (actually, we hang some in the cockpit on the stalk, put some in the icebox and some in the fruit hammock in the cabin, so they ripen at somewhat different times, but it still helps to have friends). Carefully approach the banana tree. At about head height, you whack it lightly with your machete. Count your fingers both before and after this step. If you have fewer fingers than before, stop harvesting bananas right away and take up needlepoint or something else. But, as usual I digress. Now, you’ll note that the light whacking has only dented the tree. But these trees are pretty hollow and very fibrous, so if you now PUSH the tree below the machete mark very aggressively, it will start to tear and maybe break. Or not. If nothing happens, whack it (“whack” is a technical term that us banana harvesters use down here) again and make a slightly deeper cut. It still hopefully has not fallen on you yet and is standing but weakened. Again, push hard below the whack mark. It should start to bend over above the machete line from the combination of cutting and pushing. Your goal here is to do this with a great deal of caution combined with silly abandon (you are after all, standing here in the jungle, with a two foot long sword whacking at a tree with about fifty pounds of bananas ready to fall on your head). Anyway, your goal is to do this with such precise control that the tree begins to fall very slowly. The fibers that have not yet been whacked at by your machete are still trying to hold it up, the others have long since given way to your newly discovered native spirit and your machete. If all goes well, the tree will gracefully bend and crack and deliver the bananas gently and gracefully into your waiting arms, where you will grasp them to keep them from hitting the ground and bruising. If you didn’t do this correctly…it’s not my responsibility but do make sure your health insurance premiums are fully paid.

Once you have successfully harvested a stalk of bananas and are standing in the middle of the jungle with a “downed” banana tree, use your machete to turn the cut part of the tree into humus. In other words chop up the leaves and trunk so it will decompose. Leave about three feet of the trunk of the tree intact above the ground and before you know it a new tree will grow out of this. You have done the jungle a favor. All is well and you will be eating lots of bananas, baked bananas, fried bananas, mashed bananas and banana bread. You may come to hate bananas. Your next step is to learn to identify and successfully harvest papayas, but that’s another story.

Now that I’ve divulged my super-secret banana technique, I will go on to report that we ended this Sunday in Daniel’s Bay with cocktails on Orcinius. John and Lisa are delightful people who we met in La Paz. After that, they went to the Galapagos and we went across to mainland Mexico, but we have been fortunate enough to be reunited here 3000 miles away. We had a wonderful evening sitting on the “veranda” in their catamaran which is anchored about 50 yards away. Nice.