Weather this morning looks promising for our ocean safari. We’re down at Barra Lodge for 10:30am, and we leave at about 11, having been issued with wetsuits, snorkels and flippers. My flippers are a manly size 9, with a ‘medium male’ wetsuit, while Nick is issued with a pair of size 6s and a wetsuit that appears to have an age range sewn into the back.

The briefing is predictably dull. How to get into a boat. Don’t touch the whalesharks. Try not to get sliced into bits by the propellers. etc.

To launch the boat we all have to crowd round, push it into the water and drag it deeper every time a wave lifts it off the beach. It’s one of those rigid inflatable jobbies with ropes all around the sides and two big outboards on the back. On the skipper’s command we all jump in, and we’re off.

Thus begins two hours of whale and dolphin watching, in which time I get very seasick and we manage to see exactly one dolphin and no whales. At the end we pull alongside a snorkeling reef and snorkel for half an hour. I spot quite a number of Dorees, and a few [black and yellow fish], but no Nemos. The swell is impressively powerful, even for the fish, which are struggling to do much more than shoot backwards and forwards over the reef with the current.

Beaching the boat is a simple matter of opening the throttle wide, and heading for a gentle bit of beach at full tilt. Just as you get the impression that the beach will merely be a launch ramp for a journey that will see you landing somewhere in Kent, the boat simply judders to a stop in the sand. A roofless Land Rover that looks like it saw service in world war 2 and might well be up for another one arrives seconds later to collect us and whisk us back to the dive lodge.

We eat lunch at the lodge, clear our tab, and walk back to the house, as the tide is going out. The receding tide has left numerous small lagoons all over the beach and while some are marooned, others are draining into the ocean through small channels in the sand. Nick excitedly proposes to dam one of them, and we start constructing a barrier. But by the time we’re done, we realise that both sides of our dam are dry. Damn.

We try again with another lagoon and succeed in damming this one properly. With a great sense of achievement we head back to the house, and for me the inevitable realisation that I’ve gone and burnt myself again. This time on my thighs.

Afternoon is spent taking some final photos of the house for Paul’s website, and catching up on diary writing (me) and blackberrying (Nick).