Monday 8th October

Noumea
New Caledonia

22 17.173 S
166 26.266 E

Many happy returns of the day Jack, we hope that your 11th year is a great one.

Today we were supposed to return the car; Gerry decided that we should keep it for one more day so that we could go out for dinner to celebrate our wedding anniversary as we did nothing yesterday.
He set off early in order to drop the sail round to the sail maker before going to the car hire place. Whilst he was gone I put a few things away and did the dishes that were piled up in the sink – it doesn’t take too many dishes to fill the sink as it is quite small. I’d just about finished when Gerry returned, having organized the car for another day. He had stopped and bought some croissants on his way back and we sat eating them for breakfast. We chatted for a while about the tinned meat we have on board still, we have been told by a couple of boats that the Australian quarantine authority will take canned meats off of us so we were trying to think up ways to use up the cans before we get home – so any suggestions what we could do with canned ham, chicken, beef, corned beef, stew will be gratefully considered. We have come up with a couple of menus for some of it but I fear we are going to be rather sick of canned meat by the time we get there! As we had the car we thought we would go back out to the hardware store – Gerry wanted a couple more things that we couldn’t live without. Right next door to the hardware place was a department store and we had a browse through there – nothing that we needed at the time, and then next to that was another supermarket. We managed to fill a shopping basket with more food items and then made our way back to the boat, neither of us really wanted to do anything special and we had exhausted the tourist traps so we spent the afternoon on the boat. Gerry scrubbed the decks whilst I cleaned out the clothing lockers – a complete waste of time really as they look just as bad as when I started. An afternoon nap followed and around 18.00hrs we were joined by Peter and Kerry for cocktail hour which turned into a wine and cheese session. We managed to drown a few bottles of red, all a bit of an experiment as we had no idea what we were drinking (one of the bottles is called l’ARSE – what could it possibly taste like you have to wonder!) Anyway we had a great evening chatting, laughing and exchanging stories, the time flew by and it was soon 22.30hrs and we were waving goodbye to our inebriate guests who are sailing off around the island tomorrow.
We had managed to avoid going out to dinner to celebrate yet again – oh well there is always next year!