April 8th, 9th 1982

April 8^th + 9^th pretty much have to go together, very largely because I am pretty well unable to distinguish clearly between them… for the most part, anyway.  On neither day was anything really done.  Despite all his promises, Dave really did nothing which advanced our cause of getting our mizzen mast erected.  In fact, he has been a right royal pain in the arse.  He + Monika have been bickering a lot, mostly with the fault on his side, and this has been getting us down.  He is often incredibly rude to Monika, he expects her to find things that he has mislaid, + he is not at all appreciative of the major role she performs in getting things done.  He did buy her a small stereo cassette player the other day, for her birthday (a month late) but it is fairly self-evident that the toy is aimed primarily at himself.  The positioning of the thing also caused a major row on one of these 2 days, with Dave eventually spending 4 hours re-arranging the stored goods in the main cabin, because he couldn’t bear to see Monika do it… when he should have been hunting down a ship for us.

We did do one or 2 jobs tho’ – I made my first venture up the mast, to retrieve a useless piece of wire that might otherwise foul things up – it was a long way up, but not nearly as hairy as I had previously imagined.  And Val + I sorted thro’ a soggy + mildewed mess of a roll of old charts that John had passed on.  They were totally useless, but Dave took far longer to come to the same conclusion, so that too was wasted time.  I met up with Dave, an English guy, in the bar on Thursday night, + had quite a good chat – he has 4 Genesis tapes he doesn’t want… but wants to swap.  He’ll have to be coaxed to let them go for cash.

Returned to our original berth Good Friday afternoon – a very smooth operation – + in the evening visited Craig + Sarah for a terrific steak meal (tho’ we’ve had steak so often recently it’s becoming boring.)  Unfortunately, both Craig + Dave are ex-military, so their talk centred on military things.  Tho’ I did try to present an alternative viewpoint at times.

Well aren’t I the grumpy one.  And more moaning about Dave… when both of them were treating us like family – with both the good things and the bad that that implies.  But it says a lot more about me than about Dave, and not necessarily to my advantage.  Getting bored with steak indeed!