'I don't know if I can take much more of this,' Mick said as the sun fell like a fat orange into the horizon across our anchorage. This is Mick from Martlesham near Ipswich, who we'd last met a year ago, over two thousand miles away in Las Palmas. He became a source of inspiration for us after meeting on the marina pontoon. We'd asked the standard cruising question, 'Where are you going to next?' and his smile seemed carved out of relief, reflecting the Canarian sunshine that afternoon. 'I'm just glad I made it this far.'

Despite what he says though, Mick has been ahead of us the whole way. Back in Las Palmas, we told him we were thinking of going to the Cape Verdes and guess what, Mick and his fellow crew member, a man who bucked the fancy trend in the Canaries during the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers and happily benefited from hanging around the marina bins for London banker cast-offs and who, after a intense moment’s confusion, we discovered was also called Mick, went there first. We'd get regular reports from Mick no. 1 then; instructive, quietly serious, sometimes even a little scary. From the Cape Verdes, Mick wrote, 'Mindelo is ok, strange marina, everything's on the move all the time, half the boats are French. Watched one of those deep sea fishing boats sink in the harbour this morning. Everything is fairly cheap and the wifi slow.' Whoa, we thought and prepared ourselves for the hazards of sunken vessels and poor internet. Then the night before we left for the Caribbean from the Cape Verdes with luckily not such bad internet, we received this, 'Hi Jack and crew, we made it after 21 days, we're in St. Vincent and the Grenadines island of Bequia. Crossing was ok but glad it's over, a lot of wind and squalls, be no problem in a bigger boat.. Caught 4 dorado, 1 skipjack tuna and 2 squid on the way so plenty to eat. Would have caught more but there's an amazing amount of weed on the sea.' Ok, lots of squalls, we told ourselves and three possible weeks of food. I propelled myself into action: last minute supermarket run! The Atlantic crossing and supermarkets, even now I still can't separate the obsessive link between these two things. Then once we were in the Caribbean, we asked Mick where he was planning to be for hurricane season. His reply; 'Talking to a guy a few buoys down across, he's a helicopter pilot living and working in Trinidad, says his boat's been here since May last year. Says he wouldn't keep his boat in Trinidad, says it's full of drugs and 350 murders a year.' Ok, we told ourselves, Grenada here we come. 

Months later now and Mick has joined us at St George's anchorage. 'I'm just glad to get out of Prickly Bay. It's like Butlins in there,' he said, sipping a cup of tea in Quest's cockpit. He'd barely finished his tea though when news came of a large, circling low pressure making its ways across the Atlantic and unlike me, this storm wasn't worrying about the lack of fresh vegetables a thousand miles out. It was slow-moving and low in latitude as it made its way towards us, two similar features that characterised the progress of another hurricane. Hurricane Ivan. 

We hear a lot about Ivan. Grenada still wears its scars as ruined houses and a fresh sense of possibility. A storm like that, it could come, it did come. 'We're still remembering Ivan,' our British boat insurance company reminded us like a stern headmistress back in April. The island's infrastructure was dismantled. No police presence, the prison's walls breached. When we first got to Grenada, we met a nice couple who'd experienced Ivan tell us that the worst part of the storm was afterwards. While we stood together on the beach on a balmy Sunday, watching our kids play together in the sea, they said, 'The rumours were unbelievable and even if they were only half true, they'd have been equally as shocking. Looting and thieving and raping. The thing is, none of the rumours were true, I mean, except for the looting of supermarkets and empty houses but that was because there were no supplies being brought in. But even after all the damage to trees and houses and roads, the rumours swirling around were the worst thing.'

Since June, we've kept an extra fixed eye on the weather. We've learned about Tropical Waves which roll almost constantly across the Atlantic, one in front of the other bringing periods of unsettled weather and rainy squalls. Then last week, the first big storm that looked to be a threat began to form. We started receiving weather emails from a guy in Florida who's roof is covered in white satellite dishes, to 'be prepared'. One tracking model said it would go North, another said that it would be South of Barbados. Bertrand, our favourite taxi driver, studied the satellite images as we paced together on our Saturday shop up and down the supermarket aisles. 'If it's South of 12 degrees,' he said, 'then you have to be careful. Ivan was between 11:4 and 11:8.' Right, we thought, this is good information since Grenada sits squarely at 12 degrees and is also the line of latitude that most storms follow across the Atlantic before they're pushed North West. The low we were looking at on the phone's screen was halfway across the Atlantic and just below 12 degrees! Not a good sign. Meanwhile, Bertrand looked down at the girls with a slightly disapproving gaze. In the supermarket, Delphine was goading Lucia into chasing her with the trolley and Lucia was just about to accept the challenge. I winced at his _expression_, no doubt making the inevitable comparison with Grenada's usually ultra-well behaved kids, at least in public. 'Your kids still excitable as ever, eh?' 

'So what are you going to do, Mick?' Jack asked, later on that afternoon. I was just putting the last of the unusually large shop into the cupboards. 'If it hits, I might take some cash out and go sit at the airport,' Mick said, sipping another cup of tea. We lifted our eyebrows. We'd spent the previous morning scrubbing Quest's hull, freeing her of slime and barnacles, ready to run South if the storm came any closer, towards Trinidad and then back again. The girls had started sailing camp at the Yacht Club a week before and had another week to go. It would be a shame to miss any of it, especially as Lucia had described how to tack and how to gybe in relation to the wind that had taught me something and Delphine had explained, looking at me in duh-brain terms, the difference between an Optimist dinghy and a Mosquito. But still, a storm was a storm. 

Later on just before the sun set, the email came. The guy with the satellite dishes decorating his roof like large white ears, reported the storm was already North of 12 degrees and wouldn't come close to the lower Windward Islands after all. No need to move. 'But,' he warned in the methodically sober style which always makes us wonder if he ever sleeps, 'there's another low right behind it, building with intensity and already more sizeable than the one in front.' We looked at each other. Mick smiled the same smile we saw that Canarian afternoon. 

Love from Quest and her crew xx