This is the downside of friendship while cruising. Good friends eventually say goodbye or at least au revoir. Anne will be coming back to Grenada in November but by then we expect to have headed west. We may again meet up in the western Caribbean but we can’t be certain. We will remain optimistic that this is not goodbye forever.

While we were eating, Scott had gone to town for some R&R. We had left him the dinghy to get back to Dignity. Around 10pm we received a call from him because he’d spent the last hour trying to start it and had, in great frustration, given up. Being a boat tech all his life he did not concede lightly. I made a general request for assistance on VHF 68, the local cruisers channel, and was answered by Sue & Bill from Unchained. Bill came to the rescue picking me up from Dignity and dropping me off at the dock where Scott was waiting. I managed to start the motor fairly quickly. Scott was feeling a little humbled by this. I think this was down to the broken choke which had I had jury rigged a while back and knew how to fiddle with correctly. I do have the spare part now so I’ll have to expedite this fix.

Thanks Bill.

The final piece of excitement missed in yesterday’s blog was the excitement surrounding my lost flip flop while on the dock at Prickly Bay Marina. Back in the US I had bought an extremely comfortable pair of flip flops. I had left them, with several others, on the port transom. A little while later we could only find one of them. We looked around the boat in case someone had moved it and came to the conclusion it must have been knocked or blown overboard somehow. We searched everywhere around the dock and I even went out in the dinghy to search. No luck. I was cross and despondent as I’d barely had them down here for 24 hours. Having given up the search we did find it. It was on the bed in our room. It must have been knocked through the small porthole by accident. Hurray.

Yesterday evening we went ashore to enjoy Happy Hour at “De Big Fish” with a few of the local cruisers amongst whom were some old faces. Bees Knees and Cat Tales were both (all four) there. Also we saw Bill and Sue from Unchained who we last saw, briefly, back in Dominica. Also were Dennis and Elaine from Audrey Paige. We stayed quite a bit longer than an hour before heading over to the marina where we were tied up to have pizza for dinner. We had a couple of extra drinks with this and were a bit sozzled by the time we returned to Dignity.

Scott arrived around 9:30 and it was back to the bar to socialize. Didn’t go to bed until after midnight. This morning I had a nasty hangover.

Today we’re at work checking the boat out. We’ve already left the dock to perform some tests while under motor and are completing the work back on anchor.

We’re going touring with Scott tomorrow. We have a taxi lined up who will take us around the island to go hiking to waterfalls and to go to the fish night on the west coast. Everyone says the fish night is good fun and tomorrow is special as they’ll have live bands too.