A new day.  We had breakfast, cereal and banana of course, and were then asked by our German neighbours if we could run them through where would be good to visit before they headed up to the BVIs to meet other ARC Germans who were going to return to the Mediterranean in convoy.  (Please don’t even think about U boats).  We had fun going through a whistle stop tour of the islands, praising Anageda, Anguilla, Barbuda and Bequia and writing off Mustique, St Barts and Statia.  We felt VERY experienced and sage like as we delivered our verdicts.  They gave us a bottle of rose for our troubles which was totally unnecessary but very sweet of them.  Bob decided to get ourselves ready to go should Lawrence ever appear and rummaged around fruitlessly for the hose pipe.  Like so many other things, it had disappeared.  Not wanting to be palmed off with a dodgy old lookalike, “this is yours!”, Bob nipped up to the chandlery (very good, only the first visit so far) to get one.  He met Lawrence who was not looking as if he had any intention of heading to Windy at any time soon.  Resigned to yet another frustrating nothing day, we scooted over to get petrol, raced rounds the supermarket (Bob was on his best behaviour because I was not in the best of holiday moods)and returned for luncheon on board.  Mid first bite, Lawrence arrived and set to reinstating the vang.  This proved most entertaining when one of the lads helping inadvertently ended up sprawled across the spray hood, not cool at all and difficult to recover from with any grace.

We could now leave, hooray, so we pottered up to the Marina Office to state our intentions that we were going out, we could be some time, but were concerned that there was a guaranteed berth available on our return.  There wasn’t.  It transpires that somewhere in the small print it states that while the ARC are in Rodney Bay they have Absolute Priority (capitals are deliberate) and the marina can just tell us where to go.   Even if we refused to leave our berth they have the right to forcibly remove us.  This was delivered to us by the deputy operations manager who seemed to enjoy giving us this news and bristled with his own self importance and supreme power.  My psychopath button once more being engaged I left Bob to go and see the head honcho to see if he could get them to relent in any shape or form.  They “cannot guarantee anything” so it is rather a risk but we decided to go and check out anyway.  We will just have to wait and see.

On  our journey we bumped into a chap, local, probably mid forties, that we often see loitering about who always gives us a most cheerful “hello” and doesn’t seem to want anything.  He stopped us and explained that I reminded him of his wife.  She comes from Eastbourne apparently and is 73!

It has proved too late to go anywhere today but we are heading off first thing tomorrow.  We just can’t wait to get going with our real holiday.