The day everything broke!

Extremely early wake up as I had my annual check in with my gynae in England over the phone, to keep me topped up on all my HRT! We set off walking to the hospital at 7:30am, for our Covid test to allow us into Antigua. Of course it is the opposite side of the bay to us, but we wanted to walk it as we needed the exercise. It was a steamy long walk in the end, even that early, (nearly 9km round trip clocked on our phones) with a killer last little uphill. It is a very quaint hospital on a steep promontory into the sea, it is the gov hospital and reminded us so much of Africa! First you find the rather dodgy Lab area and get a receipt from a cashier that is in a grubby little room, efficiently letting in 3 people at a time. Then you go upstairs to a waiting room packed with people, and most of the chairs with covid signs on them forbidding sitting too close with social distancing. Here you needed a form filled and a computer generated sticker. Clearly and quite rightly covid tests for travel purposes are the lowest priority. During our long wait I had noticed they had used the wrong spelling on our cashier receipt, so back down to the cashier to get that changed. Finally our form came through and then we had to find the building for the test, where a very efficient and rather officious lady was telling many locals they had come too early for their test to be valid for their flight, poor things. Finally we had our nasal passages swept and enjoyed walking back to Polepole along the harbour front with all the fisherman selling and cooking fish on the pavements.

6am sunrise in Port Louis marina

At last we were on our way, with just one stop to the fuel dock to full up with diesel. All went beautifully. We pulled out of Port Louis and Rowan got the gennaker and main sail out. We were whizzing along. We were doing 10 knots and happy. Rowan got a call and he told them how well it was all going. What a jinx that was! I was quite surprised when Rowan came and told me we were going to have to take the gennaker down as the wind was picking up. Literally minutes later there was an almighty twang and we suddenly had this huge sail flapping out over the water, it had broken through a shackle. Now we had to get it in by hand as we could not furl it in.on the winch. Rowan rigged up a rope and he brought it down to me as I fed it into the big forward locker. We thought we had done well to get it sorted. We finally got the jib up and of course the wind died and as we were heading into it we put the engines on. I had the bright idea to get the water maker going while under engine power only to find the water maker was no longer working, looks like the engine has seized. Rowan tried a few things with the help of phone calls to try and coax it into life, but no success. Just as we were digesting that an almight crash and Jeldi Jeldi had dropped from her rope into the sea. I had noticed a very frayed rope but of course hoped for the best. In bouncy seas Rowan was trying to sew ropes together so we could get a rope through the davit, it worked beautifully until he cranked it up with the winch and ping the next minute the cleat had sheared off as we hadn't quite threaded it correctly. All very fraught in bouncy seas, because of all these issues we decided we better head back to Tyrrel Bay and try and get a few things sorted. The winds had forced us quite far west and we had to do a good 2 hours motoring to get back to the bay. We limped in about 6:45 in pitch dark which is always nerve wracking especially with the amount of boats around. Luckily our anchor drop worked like a dream, the only downside was the nearest boat had 3 barking dogs on board.

Sun setting while still out at sea

So instead of celebrating the impressive news of the Naked share price, it has tripled since Majestic bought Naked. Of course it is now only Naked as Rowan cleverly sold Majestic and it's hundreds of retail shops two months before Covid. It is the American market that is going crazy as Americans finally have cottoned onto the fact you can buy wine online. Amazing to think Amazon tried selling wine online and gave up on it! A stiff sundowner with a clunk and the welcome ping of an email notifying us our tests were negative. Things were finally improving, some food and we were in bed exhausted!