21 February 2017 Mirissa, Sri Lanka
We had an administration day. Glenys had to spend all morning rearranging our two week land trip around Sri Lanka because we’ve arrived here a week early. While we were in Thailand, she booked most of the accommodation, but has had to cancel it all and start again. We’re planning to leave here on Friday 24th and be away until the 10th March. Meanwhile, I caught up on editing photographs and publishing my blog.
If we’d stayed in the Andamans for our full visa allowance of 28 days, then we would have been starting our passage today, so I downloaded the GRIB file for the next 14 days and ran a routing in qtVlm. It looks like we would have had a horrible passage, motoring for 5½ days and we would have less than 10 knots behind us for the other two days. I’m rather pleased with myself for my snap decision to leave a week early.
In the afternoon, I went for a walk around the harbour to try to capture the colourful mayhem in photographs. The fishing boats are packed 10-deep around the main quayside, with fishermen sat in the shade repairing their nets. Wherever there’s some floor space, fish are laid out on sackcloth to dry in the sun. It’s an interesting place.
22 February 2017 Mirissa, Sri Lanka
The company who owns this small marina also manufacture fibreglass boats and they have the facilities to do most kinds of boat repairs - they even have a sail loft. I removed the fitting for our bimini and they are going to remove the broken bolt for me. Also, the exhaust on our engine has developed a small hole in the stainless steel end cap. I tried to bodge it with some epoxy, but it’s still leaking, so I removed it and I’m going to get it welded up.
I’d finished my little jobs by 10:00, so we went for a walk into Mirissa. It was very pleasant walking down the narrow roads - apart from the danger of being hit by speeding tuk-tuks as they scream around the corners. Mirissa is spread out along a main road and doesn’t have centre - mostly it’s small hotels, tourist shops and restaurants.
We walked back along the main Mirissa beach, which has lovely white sand with breaking waves. The beach is lined with bars, restaurants and touts selling whale-watching trips – it’s also packed with hundreds of white tourists, baking in the sun.
As it was near lunchtime, we walked back through the fishing port, and at the end of the breakwater, up a small road towards the Weligambay Villas hotel. We walked through the hotel complex and up a steep road that became a dirt track and then descended to the right down to a beautiful little cove called Secret Beach.
There’s a small beach, which is protected from the swell by a line of rocks, and a restaurant set under the trees with rough wooden tables set out in the sand. There were about twenty people there and it was a very chilled out place. For lunch, we had Devilled Squid and Garlic Prawns, which was very tasty.
In the afternoon, I removed and cleaned out the exhaust elbow on our engine. It had a lot of build-up of carbon and hard salt deposits, so it took an hour of chipping way with a screwdriver to get it looking presentable again.
23 February 2017 Mirissa, Sri Lanka
We packed our rucksacks ready for our two week land trip and then chilled out for the rest of the morning. In the afternoon, the repaired bimini bracket and the exhaust end cap were delivered back to us, so I leapt into action and soon had both of them fitted. I ran the engine for an hour and all seems to be fine. We’re now looking forward to going on holiday.
24 February 2017 Mirissa to Kandy, Sri Lanka
I woke up at six o’clock with a nagging worry about leaving our home in this “marina”. The finger pontoon is only about 6 metres long and Alba is 13 metres long, so a considerable length of our boat was sticking out past the pontoon. In addition, the severe rocking and rolling caused when the fishing and whale-watching boats roar past is causing chafing of the rope tied to our centre cleat.
I backed up the centre rope and ran a long rope from our starboard stern cleat to the shore. With the heavy mooring line to our port stern cleat, we are now moored much better and I will be able to sleep at night. There are a few small yachts on the inside of us, which are now blocked by our shore line, but they don’t seem to get used very often and they can always lower the stern line into the water to sail out over it.
Suranga, our tuk-tuk driver, arrived at 08:00 and whisked us off to Matara to start our land trip around Sri Lanka.
25 February to 9 March 2017 Sri Lanka Road Trip
We had a fabulous two weeks travelling around Sri Lanka. It’s a country with a diverse range of environments from the sandy beaches to the temperate hill regions where tea is grown. We started in Kandy, which used to be the country’s capital and then headed north-east to Sigiriya for some serious cultural temple gazing, also managing to fit in an evening safari at the Kaudulla National Park, where we saw wild Indian Elephants.
After a short stay back in Kandy to learn about tea making, we boarded a train up to the Hill Country where we did some lovely hikes around the tea plantations. We stopped in Ohiya, Hautale and Ella. A short trip to Udawalawe National Park for a couple more safaris completed our trip and then we headed off back to Mirissa.
We saw some lovely temples (both Buddhist and Hindu); ruins of 12th Century cities; wild elephants, scores of birds; and marvelled at the scenery in the mountains. The food was fabulous – having Sri Lankan curry three times a day for 13 days was outstanding. Glenys was shown how to cook some traditional Sri Lankan dishes, so I'm looking forward to eating Prawn Curry, Sri Lankan Dhal and Brinjal Salad in the future.
I’ve published a separate article for our Sri Lanka Road Trip.
There are more photos in our Photo Album section.
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