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Port Elizabeth commerce
Tuesday, February 24 2026
location: Cabin 300, the Star Clipper ship heading towards Bequia, the Grenadines, the Caribbean Sea
This morning Gretchen and I rode the tender to the dock on Bequia for a dry landing. On the way there, I was a disturbed to find that my heart was doing that thing where it skips every fifth beat, possibly a consequence of having taken 120 mg of pseudoephedrine yesterday. Perhaps my chemistry is no longer compatible with that particular stimulant. In any case, this didn't go on for long and faded away soon after we landed. There wa a real town at the dock, a place called Port Elizabeth with an actual bank and a supermarket, among other things. We went to the bank in hopes of pulling some US dollars out of our credit union account, but the only kind of dollars they dispensed were the East Caribbean kind (each worth a third of a proper US dollar) so we gave up on that. Then we went into a drug store in hopes of getting ear drops for a nascent case of swimmer's ear in Gretchen's right ear, but (unlike how it had been in Costa Rica) they wouldn't sell us anything without a prescription. We were, however, able to buy eyedrops, a recent discovery Gretchen had made when offered some by a friend; they're great for easing the burn of saline sea water in the eyes.
We walked along the port's beachfront past the people selling crafts beneath mispelled signs (one was offering "jewery"), running across Carin from the boat. In the course of chatting with her, Gretchen casually mentioned that she is 55 years old. Carin was astounded, saying Gretchen looked in her mid-30s at most. "Well, Gus is 70," Gretchen added, and Carin took a moment to process that before realizing it was a joke.
Further along the beach, we passed a place where brown boobies were flying low over the water, occasionally diving into it with ripple-free plunges. There was also some sort of heron patiently waiting for fish, and when a huge school of them suddenly flowed towards shore, he managed to grab one, which it took awhile for the bird to get into a position suitable for swallowing.
We continued along the beach past the last of the businesses until we found a place with shade. At that point Gretchen went snorkeling and I stayed back to do the light-reading/being-bored thing I'd been doing on Caribbean beaches. I also watched some of the nearby clusters of people to see how they were enjoying the beach. One skinny little French-speaking boy was trying, with his father's verbal-only encouragement, to wrestle a large piece of driftwood out of the surf. All he really had to do was allow some waves to push it up onto the beach while preventing others from pulling it out into the sea, but he couldn't quite figure out the physics. Later when the father came out of the water, I saw he had an enormous pot belly completely out of proportion to the rest of his body.
On the other side of me was a couple of women with an older man. The man sat on the beach in the sun while the women waded out into the water. Interestingly, they communicated entirely in sign language.
After I'd had enough of the boredom, I waded into the sea and put on my flippers and other snorkeling gear and then gradually swam towards the rocks at the end of the beach, the place where the snorkeling would be good. There were actually fish well before I got to the rocks, but they tended to be the color of the sand instead of the metallic blues and firey yellows one typically seeks when snorkeling. At the rocks, though, the fish were indeed amazing, and there were great numbers of them. It felt a little like I was one of them every time a wave passed through and all of us were lifted briefly and then set back to where we had been. I swam out around the rocks, crossing deep chasms full of sea pens and other interesting sessile life forms. But I'm always a little anxious in such alien environments where I don't have the best agility, so I soon turned around and headed back. Along the way I saw a delightful eel. He was dark blue with bright yellow markings. When I returned to the beach, it was a small one reachable from the larger beach through an archway in the rock.
When Gretchen finally returned, she claimed to have also had a great snorkeling experience and described various creatures whose actual names we did not know.
At that point, we started our walk back north towards where we would be picked up by a tender. At Jack's Beach Bar, we ran across Cathy and Simon, who said they were able to get good WiFi there. Wow, unmetered internet sounded like such a luxury, and maybe I could be drinking a beer while using it! I had my phone with me, but was unable to get onto the internet for some reason, so we gave up on that dream and continued back to heart of Port Elizabeth, the most touristy place we'd yet encountered on this trip. It was full of lumbering white people from the several mid-sized cruise ships anchored in the harbor, both of them incorporating the word "silver" into their names. The dock was crowded with these people embarking and disembarking from their much larger tenders, and our tender was nowhere in sight, so I suggested we go to that supermarket to get some sunblock. While there, I also decided to get a bottle of cheap Caribbean rum. I got the smallest bottle they had, which was 750 mL, but Gretchen was horrified that I was buying so much, and started loudly (and embarrassingly) berating me for it. "Don't shame me," I calmly replied, and this worked like a magical incantation.
Back on the ship, the lunch had a marked Asian theme, with sushi, a Korean soup, a Chinese noodle dish, and perhaps other Asian items. Unfortunately, the sushi was rubbery, and one "roll" even included the most non-sushi item possible (cheese, though it was of course vegan cheese), but the Korean soup was pretty good, and there was even an appropriate hot sauce to put in it. (Sadly, the hot sauce situation on the ship has been otherwise dismal, with Tabasco sauce and sometimes an Asian hot sauce being the only options available, completely neglecting the fact that we were sailing through the region with the world's best hot sauces. Fortunately, I still had quite a bit left of the Baron hot sauce I'd stolen from Mount Edgecombe.)
This afternoon, Gretchen decided to go back onto Bequia without me but with a completely different couple named Cathy (actually Catherine) and Simon. The plan was to rent a water taxi and go to a different snorkeling place. This other Catherine & Simon lives in Switzerland, though she's from the United States and he's from the UK. It turned out that neither of them is actually vegan, which was a strike against them in Gretchen's book, and then the Catherine was also somewhat annoying to boot.
Meanwhile I did the thing where I drink a whole 100 mL of gin from a coffee cup while hanging out in the Piano Bar working on ESP8266 code on my laptop. But as I was doing this, a two-man calypso band (complete with a steel drum) was playing various familiar covers out in the Jungle Bar. So eventually I put my laptop away and came out to see what was happening. Kelly was there dancing with other familiar faces, and I think Simon was there too. I was just drunk enough to want to dance as well, so at some point the two performers were inspired by all the dancing and held a mike stand so that we would limbo beneath it. I was the first one through, soon followed by others. When Gretchen finally got back to the boat, she was delighted to hear that I'd been dancing.
Later this evening after Gretchen returned (but before dinner), I found her and Simon up on the deck and Simon got to talking about his car racing hobby, which, he says, costs him about ten thousand pounds per year. He owns a race car but doesn't actually maintain it; that's all outsourced to some other bloke. But he does drive it in the races and he's been involved in at least one crash. But the safety equipment is such that he wasn't badly injured. I wondered how he had gotten into racing, as it isn't the sort of thing I would've ever stumbled into or been able to afford as a poor young adult. It turns out that Simon had gotten into it fairly recently after watching a series of YouTube videos.
At dinner tonight, we'd all been requested to wear white, as this would help with a black-light-heavy light show that would happen after dinner (and that I would not be attending). Most people on the boat had traveled with lots of luggage and had whole wardrobes to select from, so most people were able to outfit themselves almost entirely in white. In our clique, though, white clothes just aren't a thing, and the best, say, Brian could come up with was a shirt that had some yellow and brown patches. As for me, I wore a dark grey shirt. The most comical reaction to the white-outfit request was that of the cruise's one goth girl, a skinny young tattoo-covered woman with a shock of artificial blue hair who, up until tonight, had been wearing nothing but lacy black dresses. Tonight she was wearing a lacy black dress that was speckled with white details. The older woman she was with, who I took to be her mother, is very much not a goth and wears mostly white outfits that sparkle with tiny sequins, so she was set for tonight. The two rarely dine with anyone else and it doesn't seem like they've been making friends on this cruise.
Some sort of heron (Google Images says "little blue heron") in a tree above the beach. Click to enlarge.
The heron fishing. Click to enlarge.
The heron on the sand with fish in his beak. Click to enlarge.
The heron with a fish in his beak behind Gretchen on the path. Click to enlarge.
Wooden steps around some rocks between beaches. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen took a picture of me cleaning sand off my snorkeling gear in the surf. Click to enlarge.
I took a series of pictures as one of the cruise ships steamed north until it disappeared in the haze. I scaled the second one up so you can clearly see that the bottom part of the ship has disappeared beneath the curvature of the Earth. Click to enlarge.
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