True to form, we are behind with our blog, this time only two weeks and not the usual month. We flew to NY via Iceland which was extremely cheap and would have been comfortable if we'd been deformed midgets. As it was we were nearly crippled by the time we arrived and having had only a scrap of sleep, booked into a motel soon after picking up our Mustang convertible. Fortunately, the weather on our 300 mile journey south was glorious, with sunshine and temperatures in the eighties. We were lucky really as the last two weeks have been very hit and miss, one minute blue sky, soaring heat, the next biting winds and not quite, but freezing temperatures.  Still, it was nice to get back to the boat were there was a long list of jobs to do, not least to sandblast the entire hull back to bear metal and re paint with 6 layers of paint. With this DIY, John was in his element and did what he does best, start enthusiastically, then bitch and whine for most of the jobs duration. It was a fairly unpleasant job, especially the sandblasting which John did till he was quite literally blue in the face, but it's done now and our boat has a beautiful, smooth new bottom.

The anchor chain had not fared too well over winter and had changed from a fairly rusty but serviceable chain to a piece of worthless, rotten junk. Ten days of searching for metric chain proved fruitless despite several people being confident that ' they could get that'. We eventually ordered an imperial equivalent which we hope will fit through our gypsy and not prove to be a pig in a poke!

A series of tornados devastated a small community, less than 20 miles away, last week end, with many houses and the local church being annihilated. In gusty wet weather John went for a pizza and was delayed by a fallen tree, but luckily found me in tact upon his return, I had not been sucked up into the atmosphere, boat and all! The strongest wind we experienced that night was probably from Johns backside, a much more terrifying prospect than any tornados.

The to do list has grown shorter, but despite the boatyard kindly lending us a car we are suffering from cabin fever and are keen to make our way out of the Chesapeake, ready for our passage to Bermuda. We've managed our first fortnight in America without being ensnared by the 'seventh day Adventists', 'church of scientology', 'evangelical Baptists' or even the KKK.