Year: 2014

As the sun started it’s descent so rolled in our new neighbours, the Stadt Amsterdam, with acres of sail still to furl away and lash to the spars. It dwarfs the rest of the boats in the bay.    

We receive very welcome responses to our posts and some highlights include: Your trip inspired us into having a little more adventure in our lives and so a quick rib round Britain seemed crazy enough.  We are having a custom ribeye 6m being built and so are off to Dartmouth on Friday to finalise the spec.  The plan is about 150mile per day, so 10 days in total…… ***************** Last blog & pics very interesting perspective on things, appreciate the dilemma and tough decisions ahead. But one thing is certain whatever your final decision is, you guys committed and achieved

Our friends on Calypso, David and Anne-Marie, roared overhead on the Virgin flight to the UK. It took the waiter at Tiki about 20 minutes to guess that there were two missing and they must have flown overhead! You guys missed a good night with Charles Ellis from Norway playing live on stage (he is on holiday…) with everything from Tina Turner to Phil Collins covers on his semi-acoustic. It’s going to be quiet without the Calypso Crew.

It’s a strange phenomena but rum has a habit of evaporating in these parts. Here, modelling on the foredeck at Prickly Bay anchorage, is Chairman’s from St Lucia (standard ARC issue, strange stuff, more like brandy so we were glad to see it gone) and Appleton’s (from Jamaica and tastes like a good white rum should). Top mixes in the Caribbean; coke, fruit juices, ginger ale. Yachts have been emptying out for the past week so the once crowded anchorage has now thinned to the point that there isn’t much between us and Panama.  

We anchored in Prickly Bay a couple of weeks ago. Spares for the mainsail furling motor are on their way and are currently passing through Kentucky but the latest news from the workshop is that the hydraulic (car starter) motor has suffered a meltdown. So we will be stuck here a while whilst we order another motor. Of course whilst sitting back in the office perusing pictures of turqoise seas at 32 deg C, palm lined beaches and sunshine this looks like a good deal; hang out, wait for the odd part, plan the next move. In reality it has

Generating power has been an ongoing issue and as the months roll by the aggravation has slowly ratcheted upward. We have to generate for on average 5 hours per day, 2-3 in the morning and 2 or 3 at night. Not only does this create heat and noise during sunrise in the morning but it also means some late nights. If we are out particularly with friends and we return to the boat at midnight then we have to stay up generating power until 2am, sometimes this approaches 3-3.30am. And when not generating we are simply running off all that

We now know that due to issues with furling gear we are going to be too late to transit the Panama Canal for a Pacific crossing in Feb/Mar 2014. The alternative is to slowly make our way through the ABC Islands, Columbia, San Blas, Panama and down to Ecuador. From there we would cross to Galapagos early in 2015. But we are thinking the unthinkable; not to transit at Panama. We remained totally committed to a circumnavigation until arriving in the Caribbean. We can’t quite put our finger on it but we are not so enthused at the idea any

The Chocolate Factory on the Edmonton Estate; beans are cleaned and washed before being crushed to form a chocolate paste, then pressed into chocolate. After much discussion about the high cocoa content chocolate that they produce, purity of the bar, and good health benefits we bought a couple of bars. Once back in daylight we were somewhat surprised to find that the bars are only 60% cocoa.

The Rum Factory; described as a working museum the rum factory uses a water wheel to crush sugar cane, heats the juice in progressively hotter vats, then ferments in large tanks before going round the distellery to produce a rum that is 75% achohol.. Somehow this activity employs 100 people. Following the factory tour we had rum tasting. We all found it about the same as syphoning petrol…

Taking a break from the industrial stuff here are some local flowers: