FINALLY SAILING
People have asked me how the sailing is going. Well the truth of the matter is we haven’t left St Lucia as all of our pool matches are based here. Today we are heading off at midday for Martinique on our way to our first Super 8 match against the Windies in Antigua. The plan is to anchor up at secluded beaches and chill.
Super 8 is the round after the pool matches. Initially there were 4 pools with 4 teams in each. After playing everyone in your pool the top two teams progress to the super 8 round where they play everyone except the other team that was in their pool. In our case that is England. The bonus is that our victory over the English means that we already have 2 points in the bank for the super 8 round.
After the Super 8 matches the top four teams go through to the semi final round which is a straight knockout.
The first days sailing was um interesting. We had had a big night the night before and we hadn’t even left the harbour before poor Runty was feeding the fishes his breakfast and probably some leftover rum over the back of the boat. Once we got into the straight between St Lucia and Martinique Judge was following suit over the port side of the boat. I thought this was quite funny until it got even choppier. This is where the real comedy started. I drank a Berocca for breakfast and let it loose in a huge stream of bright yellow vomit next to Judge. Beige said he was alright until then but when he saw the yellow vomit he lost his guts over the starboard side which was caught in the wind and landed on Woza who was skippering the boat. Woza, Hummus and Toddie were not sick at all.
The journey to St Annes in Martinique took five hours during which time I felt sick on and off. Runty said he felt sick the whole time and considered flying for the rest of the tournament. When we dropped anchor we all went for a swin off the back of the boat to was the smell of our sick off us. Or in Woza’s case he washed off Beige’s sick.
Broke international law and took the dinghy into St Annes to buy matches.
Beige and I were on the island for less than two minutes before we offered ganga mon.
Martinique isn’t playing cricket with the rest of the West Indies because Martinique is French. This means that they don’t play English sports, they use Euros and they require a seperate visa. We only had five US dollars and it took us several attempts to get one of the graduates from the Paris School of Customer Servise to take our money. The lady who evenyually helped did it with a bitter scowl that would have earned her an A+ on her final exam.
