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timepiece miracle
Sunday, February 22 2026
location: Cabin 300, the Star Clipper ship passing Argyle on Carriacou, the Caribbean Sea
This morning Gretchen and I went on an unusually long tender ride to a wet landing on the Carriacou beach. We then walked westward until the beach ended and there was shade under a tree. That was, of course, where I decided to camp out, having forgotten that the tree in question, a Manchineel, is a species that secrets a deadly acid from its leaves. This would've been a problem had a rain cloud passed overhead, but fortunately the sky remained clear. Gretchen and I sat there for a bit while another passenger from the boat who initially looked like Cathy in the distance arrived with a friendly stray dog tagging along. Gretchen went for a quick snorkel while that dog dug an impressive hole in the sand. But then Cathy (the real one) and Simon showed up and we all decided we wanted to take a water taxi out to Sandy Island, a small uninhabited island with a few palm trees on it where there was supposedly good snorkeling. We'd asked at Paradise Beach Club how best to get to the island, and been quoted a good price that would be part of a package if we also ate a meal there.
But the water taxi guy was still out when we got to Paradise Beach Club, so Gretchen decided to pass the time by snorkeling off the beach there (where snorkeling probably wasn't so good). In the process, her watch somehow slipped off and disappeared. After we got picked up, the guy on the water taxi seemed to think that the watch could probably still be found if Gretchen looked for it later. Gretchen got to talking with the boat captain and learned he'd lived for awhile in Brooklyn and was familiar with the various places she mentioned. He'd done some boating there as well, perhaps in the Gowanus Canal. The boat we were in, he said, belonged to his mother.
After being let out on Sandy Island, the four of us immediately started snorkeling off the island's rocky eastern end. The waves here were gentle and the water not especially deep, so I felt confident snorkeling for longer than I had in other places on this vacation. There were plenty of fish, but much of the coral looked to be bleached and dead, something Gretchen had noticed in a number of the previous places she'd just snorkeled. While I was out there, a passed into a place that was a bit too shallow over the reef and was dashed onto it by descending wave, injuring my upper right thigh in a way that made it hurt every time I moved it but, strangely, left no visible bruise.
When I'd had enough of that, I hiked westward to where sea water washes across a sandy causeway connecting two lobes of Sandy Island. I really wanted to make Sandy Island be two separate islands, so I used my foot to dig out a Sueze-style canal allowing water to more easily cross the causeway, but it was completely filled in after a few waves passed. From there I continued westward on the tiny westmost lobe of the island, where several mostly-overturned palm trees clung to life. A pelican was relaxing in one of the trees. As I turned around to head back east, I saw an osprey flying overhead.
I ended up creating a nest with a towel in the shade of a palm tree, and there I read more of that stupid Time Magazine issue about AI. At some point I dozed off.
Not long after that, the water taxi from Paradise Beach Club to pick us up. As I was gathering my things, I couldn't find the net bag for my snorkeling gear. [Later it turned out it had found its way into Simon and Cathy's stuff and they would return it, but not before Gretchen would somehow manage to obtain a different net bag on our ship.]
Paradise Beach Club had gotten the memo that there would be as many as 150 vegans on the beach today, so they'd added some vegan items to their menu and highlighted existing items like their veggie burger. The four of us sat down to eat and we all managed to find things we wanted. I went for that veggie burger, confirming with our waitress that it came with "chips," and assumed she would understand that in the British sense (that is, as french fries). The burger was pretty good (again, the pattie was nothing like meat, but that was fine), though the chips were actually corn chips, an especially greasy kind that went well with the hot sauce (which, at Paradise Beach, was Baron, my new favorite). There was also a pasta and some other things. Simon, Cathy, and I all also had little 275 mL beers, though I made the mistake of ordering a Hurricane Reef when the menu said it was an IPA. It was actually a pilsner. So when we got a second round, I went with the tried-and-true that Simon and Cathy were sticking with, Carib.
At around this time, Frederick the cruise director arrived, and when he learned that Gretchen had lost her watch, he put on some snorkel gear to help her look for it. They spent a fair amount of time out there by the buoys where Gretchen thought she'd lost it, with Frederick making repeated dives to the bottom and then blowing water out of his snorkel on surfacing. But the watch was proving elusive. So I decided to look for it in a different place. I'd noticed that the material on these beaches was well-sorted by the waves, with bulky things like matchbook-sized clamshells and stones ending up in a line several feet seaward from the line where the lowest beach sand was occasionally exposed to air by retreating waves. Starting in the west several dozen feet, I walked along this line and examined every black object of a certain size that I saw. Mostly all I found were a few scraps of basalt, but I continued eastward some distance beyond the part of the beach closest to where Gretchen and Frederick were looking. Just as I was about to give up, I saw a rectangular black object at my feet. When I grabbed it, I could feel it was made of rubber. It was a watch, but what were the chances it was Gretchen's? But when I pulled it out of the water, I could clearly see that it was. I immediately shouted out to Gretchen (who had given up the search and was socializing from a Paradise Beach chaise lounge), saying I'd found the watch. Everyone at Paradise Beach Club, including an unrelated group of tourists from one of the catamarans anchored off Sandy Island, looked on in amazement and burst into applause, and poor Frederick came wading out the surf empty-handed. It was genuine timepiece-related miracle.
Back on the ship, I briefly got onto the internet, and when I did, I saw a Facebook direct message from our friend Ray saying that our housesitter was having a problem with the water back in Hurley. The pressure switch that controls the well pump had a tendency to get stuck in the past, though I'd thought I'd fixed this with a blast of spray lubricant and it hadn't happened in awhile. In fact, it hadn't happened in so long that I was concerned that perhaps that wasn't the problem. But I detailed the procedure for fixing it, both to Ray and to the housesitter (who had sent me an email over twenty hours ago that I hadn't gotten because I hadn't checked my email). The housesitter eventually got back to me with a picture from the relevant part of the boiler room, and I described exactly which object to strike with the handle of a screwdriver (which would apply a kinetic jolt, but not one so big as to be destructive). By dinner time, our housesitter had the water working again, and the crisis had passed.
I should mention, by the way, that I've been good about conserving the three gigabytes of bandwidth we'd purchased at the start of the cruise with one exception: the loading of my Gmail tab in Chrome. When I did that one thing, I somehow burned through 400 megabytes of bandwith (13% of our allotment) in a minute or two. Evidently my laptop hadn't loaded Gmail in awhile, and when it did so, it needed to transfer a bunch of email into a local in-browser storage system. The lesson here is to always make sure you've recently loaded Gmail on a computer that is about to enter a time period when it will have to use an expensive data plan.
Before dinner, the management of the cruise decided to show (in the Jungle Bar) a goofy slapstick black & white film about a wealthy woman being served by an increasingly drunk butler who keeps tripping over the stuffed head of a tiger at the end of a tiger-skin rug. We were expected to find this hilarious and worthwhile, but it was neither of those things to me. It would've made more sense to have shown a Key & Peele skit instead.
At dinner, I was especially excited about a mushroomy dish (the mushrooms have been good and plentiful on this cruise). Since it was my night to buy a bottle of wine, I ordered a second cheapo 18 euro bottle off the wine menu, and again Brian said it was "fine."
Later tonight, an old black and white movie was projected onto a bit of sail up on deck, and Gretchen was there to watch it while I stayed back in the room. She said it was about a German sailing ship hauling freight around the Cape of Good Hope, and she was astounded by it all: the acre of sail, the lack of safety measures, the ordinariness of crew deaths, and the lexicon, which included a distinct German name for every rope in the ship's rigging.
Rocks seen from the ship today. I didn't want to risk my good camera on another sandy beach today. Click to enlarge.
A hilly island with a structure viewed from the ship today. Click to enlarge.
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