Beach Patrol and Washing

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Rain fell throughout the night but cleared in the early morning. I woke just after six to soft blue sky. It was probably the clearest it's been since we've been here as I could distinctly discern the undulating shape and mottled green and brown landscape of the island of Zakynthos south across the sea.

Bree and I had morning patrol. Jean and Helen left with Manu to check out another nest beach west of Katelios called Korione. As we were still without rubbish back we would just do a patrol of the beach to look for turtle tracks.

The Mounda Beach as it is called is 2.8 kilometer stretch of sandy beach. It's gentle slope, sand consistency make it ideal for loggerhead nesting as does the shallow shelf structure off shore. It is also not overly developed or traveled. On the morning patrol we're looking for any sign of nesting as the season usually begins in late May or early June.

We didn't find any turtle tracks but we did manage to drag a very heavy, half buried and waterlogged shipping pallet from the water's edge farther up on the shore and hopefully out of the turtles' way.

With the sun the day warmed up quite nicely so when I got a back to the villa around nine I decided to do some washing. The process brought me back to my days in Georgia as it consisted of filling up a bucket in the bathroom, mixing in some washing powder, throwing in the laundry, doing my best to replicate the agitation cycle of a washing machine for a few minutes and then leaving them for soak. I rigged up some elastic washing line between two trees at the edge of the concrete veranda, returned to my clothes, dumped the soapy water, rinsed them, wrung them and hung them.   

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