EC-Rider Travels

Today we were joined at breakfast by rather a sweet, but slightly injured, raccoon who apparently had her babies nearby. There was also a rather stunning jay/magpie which apparently are very common, but had a nice hair-do! Sadly there have not been as many beautiful birds as we had hoped we might see.

My Christmas present from Tim was to go deep-sea fishing….. Rather like last year’s outing to the O2 to see Ibizan DJ, Pete Tong – not top of my Xmas list but brilliant and in fact an inspiration for my travels – I wasn’t sure how much I was looking forward to this oneg. But OMG! it was amazing.

At 8am we met Nobel and his little boat, who zipped us out to his fishing boat. We headed out to the deep blue sea and within about ten minutes we had something on the line as the reel whizzed out into the distance. Emma strapped on the ‘fighting belt’ and started reeling the beast into the boat. It was huge, but unfortunately at the eleventh hour managed to wrap itself around the propeller and jump off. 😔.

Ten or fifteen mins later we caught a second and it was apparently my turn – on with the ‘fighting belt’ and the heave started. Goodness it was hard-work, my admiration for fishermen went up tenfold, and with some help from Tim we landed a HUGE (to me!) mahi mahi. Nobel promptly requested a beer out of the cooler which he poured down the poor unfortunate fish’s throat – apparently this quickly kills it. Still there was a lot of flappin’ and a lota lota blood.

But all the same very exciting. Nobel filleted it for us and we took it to the restaurant on the beach who cooked it for us – I can’t tell you how good it was. What a great present, thank you Tim and thank you both for coming to see me on my travels, it has been so lovely.

In the afternoon, Tim hired the longest surfboard I have ever seen and caught a few waves – I have the video! I then had a go and managed to do a spectacular nose-dive… so undignified! In the evening we went to the most fabulous restaurant called Pangas and had a truly delicious ‘last meal’.