Quite frankly we are getting more than a bit fed up with the weather.  It appears that Bob and I are rain magnets. Whatever county or country we are in, whether Wiltshire or the West Indies, it just keeps raining.  Last night in Salisbury we cowered under brollies in the garden of Cafe Le Doudou to eat our way through delicious broccoli soup, fish cakes and Isles Flotante and floundered back to the boat to go soggily to bed.

This morning we left Salisbury over a mist dampened, quiet sea, wrapped up to our gills in cagoules, and pottered out to put up the sails in very seemly gentle breezes and served breakfast that we ate genteelly without the cereal flakes blowing out of the bowl and overboard has so often been the case.  We “raced” Eddy Jordan in his boat Lush for five minutes but concluded that Windy was no match for an 80 foot Oyster.  We prudently had the mainsail with one and a half reefs because we soon met raging winds of 30 and gusting up to 39 knots again, but funnily enough never hitting the magic 40, and bucking waves coming at us from the beam.  It would have been a fantastic run, actually recording a 9.7 knots at one stage (surfing down a wave), if it were not for the constant blasts of rain and bucketfuls of waves hitting us in the face, rendering us blind because of the salt encrusted spectacles, dripping up our sleeves and down our necks.  Even warm water can become somewhat tiresome.

We reached St Pierre and anchored off the pier and sat own to a late lunch interrupted by our neighbour, apparently we were parked over his anchor, so we had to move a further 40 metres away just to make sure.  Bob and Francesca dashed into town to catch customs and immigration before they closed at 5pm and to pick up some shopping essentials such as the rather good duck terrine that they sell at the 8 a huit supermarket which doesn’t actually open from 8 to 8 as you would expect, somewhat like the customs that had decided to close at 3pm.  They got quite wet as it continued to rain on and off.

We decided to go and seek out our favourite tarte tartin restaurant and were quite determined to preserve our seats from the rain and actually enjoy a meal without soggy bottoms.  We all designed ourselves natty little seat preservers from bin bags using a variety of methods and styles, drawstring skirt, sarong style and Bob’s a rather strange nappy, which all proved surprisingly effective, and also surprised the fishermen on the pier as we clambered from the dinghy modelling our green plastic fashion items.

Sadly the tarte tartin restaurant was closed but we dived into a waterfront place that was at least open and served a reasonably good dinner, tasty but not quite up to scratch, and it filled the spot.  It rained while we were there, it rained on the way back in the dinghy and we were once again wet to the skin, except for our bottoms which were bone dry.