I know you don’t need to be told because you can see for yourselves from our tracker page, but just in case you haven’t been there today, we are now back in Nanny Cay Marina, having had a most enjoyable broad reach back from North Sound in fresh 20 to 27-knot Easterlies with the sun shining …. what more could we ask for? We flew just the genoa most of the way and were still doing up to 8 knots. However, we did play around with the 2nd and 3rd reefs before we left North Sound, just to be sure that nothing had been messed up during the installation of the new stack pack. All seems to be in order so we should be able to cope with strong winds if we need to, though of course we have no intention of being out in anything much over 30 knots if we don’t have to.

The dinghy drift that was scheduled for a couple of nights ago ended up being cancelled because the wind had picked up and a few rain squalls came through. The fear was that the dinghys would end up in Leverick Bay, which is a long dinghy trip back to the BEYC. Instead we ended up going to the Fat Virgin bar in Biras Creek for Happy Hour. They looked after us well but more interestingly is that we met yet more people, 2 more couples, who know Gerladine and Norman …. what is going on here, I wonder???? They both were on Island Packets 44/45; one couple (Noel and Tracey Dinan) was chartering and currently live in New Jersey but Noel is from Cork and works for Merck; the other (Stewart and Anne Litton) are truly seasoned sailors, having competed in the Tomatin races off the West coast of Scotland for more than 20 years (probably including 1980, when Hope was crewing on her dad’s boat), done at least 3 Atlantic crossings and explored many of the Carribean islands. They hail from Stirling and are already on their passage back to the US East coast. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if our paths crossed again…

Sad to say, we did not win any prizes for our efforts in the scavenger hunt but we did enjoy a special dinner in the BEYC last night. It was a sad reminder that the season for frolicking in the islands is coming to a close as most folks are heading out of the islands now before hurricane season starts.

One more piece of good news is that with a bit of help from my dear brother to reassure us that we were using the correct passwords, we managed to get the chart plotter to talk to the iPad again. We tend to do all our trip planning using Garmin software on the iPad and then send routes to the Garmin chart plotter which we use to steer to. So, we were very anxious when all of a sudden the two would not talk to each other… and we couldn’t send all the routes that we had been working on so hard.