The children have felt completely at home on the boat since day one.  We came down below one afternoon, for example, to find the majority of our mooring warps dangled through the hatches and tied together to form a makeshift climbing frame/spider’s web!  Trips in the dinghy (which Silas has named “Power Ranger, T/T Oboe”) to the beach are pretty popular too.

When the time came to set sail for Canouan everyone was excited, we were finally on our way to start exploring the Caribbean.  Silas seems to have a very fortunate talent, the sails go up and he goes to sleep, the sails come down at the end of the day and he’s wide awake again!  I tried the same but Nigel threatened to keel haul me. We dropped the hook in Canouan that afternoon and as usual, were accosted by several boat boys, one quite clearly drunk and another called “Ice Man”...though he didn’t look a bit like Val Kilmer.  So it was off to the beach/bar for guests and crew respectively and a couple of Ti Punches plus a pizza later we all braved the rather precarious dinghy dock and returned to the boat.

The next day and we’re planning to sail for the Tobago Cays, one of the maritime wonders of the world, very exciting, even the pictures in the guide book don’t seem real.   Of course being surrounded by coral reefs it is a huge pilotage challenge for our skipper in training – Ryan (me!)  A brief sail under headsail across to the Cays (keeping “One Fathom Bank” to port!) and we’re merrily making our approach, dodging the various rocks, coral heads and reefs that litter the area like an inner city playground.  We are starting to get slightly nervous as the beacons needed for our transit don’t seem to actually exist, when Nigel calls up from the chart table, “Could you slow the boat down Ryan? The chart plotter’s gone down!” Absolutely text book, I’m sure there’s an instructor in a classroom somewhere right now telling pupils that “one should never rely on electronic navigation aids as one day you’ll be sailing into the Tobago Cays for instance and POOF it’ll all go down.” Luckily, Nigel IS that instructor, so we of course had paper, 2B pencil, a written pilotage plan and a plot on the chart already running!  Dropping Anchor just before the entry to the shallows, Nigel powered everything down, did a cold restart of all the electronics and hey presto, all’s well.  Damn technology!

It’s a beautiful morning so the decision is to sail to Mustique and rub shoulders with the rich and famous!

Ryan