Hello everyone still looking for a blog entry!  We thought we should update you all after our stay in France, where we spent a wonderful three months enjoying our gorgeous granddaughter Olivia.  We had planned to return to Trinidad and Goldcrest in September.  Family developments had already led us to change our minds about sailing on into the Pacific, so we were thinking about a cruise up the US east coast via the ABC’s and Greater Antilles instead.  However these plans have now had to be put on hold because of health problems for David.  A month ago - out of nowhere - he felt a large lump on his abdomen and it was diagnosed a week later as a gastro-intestinal stromal tumour (gist).  It is a fairly rare cancer and means he has to have an operation to remove the lump and a chunk of his colon that it is attached to and take drugs afterwards to prevent more trouble.  Luckily it is not usually malignant and the surgeon was quite upbeat that he would be fit again within a few months and able to return to sailing.  Meanwhile we have rented a flat in Bath so we at least have a comfortable base while David is convalescing, but as you can imagine, it is quite a shock and not what we thought the immediate future held at all!

We are missing our boat home terribly but have the compensation of being able to spend more time with the family for a while.  This includes daughter Heather as she and her partner are just about to move from Ohio back to Britain and a new job at Manchester University. 

Hope we will be writing some proper seafaring stuff again before too long.