Position: 32:22.74N 64:40.77W 

Speed: 0

Morning of the 17^th June and we are near Bermuda. It has been a while since our last entry so this may be quite a long one. When you last heard from our intrepid crew it was the afternoon of the 15^th and we were approaching Bermuda. We reached Bermuda a couple of hours after dark and hit a snag, Bermuda is surrounded with an almost unbroken ring of reefs, with only one or two safe passages through to the harbours. Bermuda Radio advised us not to try this at night with the charts we had on board and sent us to a waypoint offshore to wait until dawn.

So we hove to and as it was far too deep to anchor, we spent the night drifting with the currents (luckily away from aforementioned treacherous reefs). We stood our normal watches but when Matt came on duty at 4am he soon realised that he had deep psychological issues with drifting helplessly so close to certain destruction. He chose to fire up the engines and in a feat of navigation and seamanship that would have made Bertie Reed proud, he motored around the island, cunningly avoiding the reefs and positioning the boat perfectly to make a straight run through Town Cut and into St George harbour as soon as it was light enough. Following two cruise ships definitely helped but the rest of the crew was still so impressed that they spontaneously broke into a chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”, when they woke up (I am writing this blog, and if I say it happened, it happened, ok?).

So we headed into St George, cleared customs, filled up on diesel and bought pretty much everything we needed including a new bilge pump from the Shell Select shop. We had a walk around and were all very impressed with this island, it is spotlessly clean, the buildings are beautiful and perfectly maintained and the people are happy and friendly. Very touristy but that also means lots of interesting shops and good restaurants as long as you don’t mind dodging the groups of 80 year olds off the cruise ships. We found a sail maker and arranged for him to come have a look and quote us for fixing our damaged Screacher but he never showed up for the appointment. We only later realised that we were not on BLT ( Bermuda Local Time, not the sandwich) and quite possibly we didn’t show up for our meeting.

After a bite to eat we headed back to the boat and then discovered that the battery charger for the laptop had up and died. Bad news for our blog but even worse news for downloading our daily weather file. After a bit of searching we found out the only place to get a replacement is in the main town of Hamilton, so we hopped a cab and took a 45 min drive to an electronics shop on the other side of the island. It was a nice opportunity to see more of Bermuda and again we couldn’t believe how neat and clean everything is, even the industrial area is pretty.

After the successful charger mission we spent a short while trying to fix the leaking hatch in the galley, siliconing the edges of the flooring laid in Tortola and painting the light bulb in the cockpit with red nail polish to make a very cool night light. We then cleared customs and headed back out through Town Cut channel on the next leg of our trip.

We raised the mainsail once through the Cut and were still motoring through the reef markers when with a big whoosh the sail came crashing down, luckily collapsing neatly back into the stack pack. We strapped Rean into a harness and tried to winch him up the mast to see what went wrong but the harness wasn’t designed for this sort of thing and he was lowered back down and we turned around and headed back to our mooring in the harbour. Once there Rean designed his own harness with some extra lines and we sent him up the mast again to find that the pin in the shackle on the halyard had sheared off.

By this time it was almost dark so we resigned ourselves to a night in port and went off to get some dinner. On our way to the restaurant we were trying to figure out what the weird noise was, there was a loud chirping, whistling sound that seemed to come from a thousand different places and was bouncing all over the walls and streets of the town. We debated birds, bats and even some sort of burglar alarm until Rean spotted a small frog slightly bigger than a thumbnail sitting on a door frame. You will not believe the noise these little suckers make and we suddenly realised why so many t-shirts and fridge magnets and shops have frogs on them – it’s like the island mascot. The advice from the customs guys is that one ever gets in your house just pack up your bed and go outside.

So, dinner and a wonderful night’s sleep in an air-conditioned cabin on a bunk that is not constantly pitching and rolling. This morning we will organise a new shackle and get underway as soon as possible. Keep watching this space for further updates.