Breathe: Update on November 6th, 2009

A new port meant a new chance to breathe. We left St. Lucia Behind a week ago to travel to Barbados, a Port I have been excited about for months because of an opportunity to go on break with some close friends for a week. The day we arrived work was all messed up; we worked from early in the morning until about noon, and then were off until 6 until 11. This was because we had to pick things up at one place then go to our berth for the port. This meant I had to do mooring stations three times that day, and put up the gangways as well. One thing about this place that is awesome is that there is a nice beach about five minutes’ walk from us. One bad thing is that we had to leave the berth to weather a storm and to wait for an industrial ship to offload flour. As I write this, we are at anchor about a mile off shore of Barbados.
Luckily, I wasn’t here for most of that malarkey, as my break has come and gone. Four of us went to a little cabin on a beach about an hour (by car) away. We were on the other side of the Island, and isolated from almost everything. The place we got (at an incredibly low price) wasn’t much, but had a stove and fridge and a freezer and some beds. When one walked out the back door onto the porch, the Atlantic Ocean would shine and glimmer, and the scent of the sea was heavy. The waves were constantly beating onto the rocky shore, making it hard to swim, but easy to relax in the water. So, with that being our temporary residence, the four of us spent the week basically doing nothing, and loving it. We found our share of beaches and did some swimming and played football, and ate a lot of meat. One day, Fitzy and I even wandered around for a couple hours and found the most amazing beach I’ve seen, but I didn’t have a camera. The first things I noticed were the mammoth rocks whose bases were worn down so much that I wondered when they would topple. The sea wasn’t so rough here, and the sand was more abundant. There were palm trees everywhere, and I even got a coconut at the base of one. Two of the nearby locals had pet monkeys (I was a little jealous).
Other than that story, not much is to be told of our break, considering it was taken to relax and breathe. The busyness of life here was made numb, along with most other feelings, for a week that God had given me. I couldn’t stop thanking God while I was there, and still thank him for a week to breathe. Now to lose my breath again…