We woke to a rather mixed bunch of weather, cloudy and the wind whistling tunefully as it is inclined to do through Deshaies. After a leisurely breakfast we puttered out, set sail and headed for Basseterre. It turned out to be an absolutely ridiculous day with the wind whooping up to 24 knots one moment and then fizzling out to absolutely nothing, drifting here and there and coming at us from all directions in a most irritating manner. It spat little gobbets of rain, shone fiercely and then just clouded over in a random fashion all day. We got fed up trying to keep up with its vagaries by tacking and ended up backing the jib, and letting it stay there half the time, out of sheer frustration. In the end we took the jib down and flapped along with a wafty mainsail and swinging boom before getting so fed up that we brought that in as well, at which point the wind grew to a respectable 18 to 20. Sigh.

All day Bob kept a sharp lookout for the dinghy (he is known for looking for needles in haystacks) but sadly with no joy.

We reached Basseterre, anchored and gave the time honoured distress wave to a passing French couple and their very scary fierce tiger of a dog, and they most kindly gave us a lift ashore, after securing the scary dog on their boat.

Fortunately the chandlery opened at 2:30pm and fortunately they had a dinghy, just the one, but that is all we wanted. The nice man in the shop gave us a lift, me in the back of the van like a not so fierce dog, round to the beach where we were anchored, to save Bob’s from too much rowing. After a great deal of exercise with the foot pump, Bob rowed the boat offshore and we were home and dry. We have attached twenty ropes to it on every place that we can possibly find to tie one and will now be paranoid about looking out for it every 5 seconds forever more.

While busily tying on the ropes, Bob’s smartest, newest cap flew overboard. In a scene reminiscent of Love Actually (Colin Firth and the eels) Francesca gallantly dived in wearing her playsuit to rescue it and raised it triumphantly. Unlike the film though, Bob stayed firmly on board clutching his boathook, but offered great encouragement.

Now we have a dinghy again, at least we can potter in to town for a look see, we will be taking an umbrella, and hopefully find a nice restaurant and some French wine to christen the new child of Windy. We do wonder where the firstborn one will end up.