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Date: 10 Nov 2011 13:47:00
Title: Still in Antigua - best laid plans and the weird skills you learn when cruising!!
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Thursday morning and after a bit of a disastrous day yesterday we had an unbelievable storm last night which kept us awake all night!!  
Tuesday's test sail went well - we remembered how to sail the boat and which ropes did what etc, the only thing we forgot was to drop the mainsail at the end - we were coming back into the dock, there were 4 of us on board, all chatting about what we had to do next etc, and just as John turned to go alongside I realised the mainsail was still up - that could have made tying up very interesting indeed! 
As I said the plan was to leave Antigua two days ago, but with one thing and another....  Our most recent issue is the washing machine which, having been plugged into US style shore power, is now on the blink - all shore power clearly is not equal.  First thing to do is get a man out - we have tried to fix it ourselves but the manual is useless!!  Getting a man out was the easy part - the problem appears to be the drain pump which is a fairly easy part to obtain and replace - providing you are on dry land, as it is underneath the washing machine.  For those of you who have not seen the boat interior the machine is in a small cupboard behind our shower, and underneath the navigation station, BIG problem.  We have had to get a specialist joiner out this morning to cut the machine out - there are all kinds of stories about the last time a washing machine was removed and the result was not pretty.
As it stands at the moment we now have an enlarged access hole behind the navigation seat and a washing machine in the shower - the man coming to fix it should be here in about an hour........ to be continued........

 The guy from 'Chippy Yacht Joinery' taking a jigsaw to the boat 

Anyway, the storm last night: we have been listening to the forecast each morning and there have been vague rumours of moderate showers all week and, although we have been able to see lightening storms around us most nights, we had so far escaped - but not last night.  We were woken by huge, blinding flashes of sheet lightening, deafening rolls of thunder and torrential rain at about 1am.  Despite this, Mother Nature decided to be kind and not send any strong winds to complete the set.  At one stage we thought that we, or at least one of the other boats in the marina might have been hit, the flash was so loud and landed just off the back of the boat. There was about 5 inches of rain last night, the decks were awash and flooding with water - it sounded as though we were sailing through heavy seas all night - at one stage there was so much water running off the bimini and one side deck that the whole boat lurched violently to one side - we were vey glad we were tied up and not out on anchor, a couple of our friends were and they had a worse night than us!!  Glenn's dinghy has been ashore for a bit of a refit and he had borrowed ours last night to go back to his boat and left her tied to the back of his boat in the water - when he woke up this morning the dinghy was full of water, almost to the top and his flip flop was floating precariously high!!  He spent about half an hour in the lashing rain 'bailing like a banshee' - his own _expression_ - trying to rescue her - we could see her from our boat and she looked very low in the water!
This morning we woke up to heavy grey skies and still more rain, but it has since brightened up and is now sunny and nice with the forecast suggesting that better weather is to follow - fingers crossed!! 
Having had a few problems yesterday we were really pleased to learn a new skill and solve one problem this morning although I think safe cracking is the last thing I expected to have to learn!!  Our safe has an electronic key pad running off battery power.  If, as happened to us, the batteries run flat, you just hook up a small external battery pack and away you go - not so simple!!  After loads of attempts and 3 sets of new batteries, we still had an unopened safe - what to do - this must be about the only manual we didn't have on the boat so I started on the internet.  It is truly amazing the stuff you can find out by inputting safe cracking into an internet search engine!!  The manual on the internet was again of little use, so after a bit of lateral thinking, a different battery set-up, much head scratching and cursing the safe opened - and was empty!!!
Good news on the washing machine though - it is now fixed and fully up and running but it took John and I about three hours to put the boat back together, the hardest part was rehanging the shower door which involved John lying on the floor half in the engine room holding the door up,  and me stuffed into a corner on top of the shower seat trying to tighten the top screw - oh this live-a-board stuff is such a lark!!
We are now out on anchor in Falmouth Harbour, cleared out of Antigua and ready to sail to Guadeloupe tomorrow.

  'Sylvia' (another Discovery 55) at anchor in Falmouth Harbour - no photo of our boat available as she looked like a laundry as I had some washing to catch up on.

As this was going to be our (3rd) last night in Antigua we had a 'pot luck' supper on Sylvia, cooked by Glenn, which basically involved eating all the fresh veg on both boats that we had been avoiding - very healthy and tasty though.  

 Glenn cooking dinner - knife and rum punch at the ready


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