Wednesday 12 January Scallops and scrapes

Today's plan was to move on south through the Gulf with an en route stop for scallops and hull cleaning. We went back to the same scallop beds we dived on Monday. While I dived to collect our supper, a simple route of going down the anchor chain and following it out and back filling the bags, David got under the boat to scrape off the accumulated growth which is definitely a blue job. In yachtie world blue jobs are done by the boys, ie engines, hulling cleaning, fishing, talking about batteries, etc and pink jobs, everything else, by the girls.

It was a feat of planning ahead that meant I could get aboard in full dive kit with my booty. I admit I'm not big and strong so before I get in the water I hang a series of lines into the water alongside the swim ladder. One is a hook for the heavy bags of scallops, another to clip my fins onto and a third has a bag into which I put my lead weight. Unencumbered I can climb up and then pull them up after me.

While David continued with the dirty job of bottom scraping I honed my skill in extracting fish from shell. He emerged from the depths with his wetsuit covered in iddy biddies, those tiny shrimp like critters that live in the detritus on the hull. Another reason why hull scraping is a blue job. We hosed and brushed him clean and then had a super sail onto the next anchorage, a big bay on the mainland.