Sat, Sun, Mon & Tuesday – 13^th, 14, 15 & 16^th July

Feverish activity on board Serafina as we complete the 3d jigsaw to make room for James who is coming to stay for a few weeks as we cruise through Maine.

The sail that we packaged up last week, was collected bang on time by DHL and is presently winging its way somewhere – hopefully Worcester. Actually it whizzed off from Boston to Cincinnati, and from there to East Midlands Airport in the UK where it arrived in less than 22 hours from the time it was collected from the yard here.

Sarah has been feeling very proud of herself as she persuaded a shopkeeper in Provincetown to give us an old plastic box that had contained nails, as she felt it had potential as either a container for charcoal for the BBQ or perhaps modified as a washing up bowl to fit in the main sink. In the end it was the latter use that it has excelled in after I had changed its dimensions somewhat with a saw. But the real fun is the printed message on the side of this container which reads “Children can fall into a bucket and drown. Keep children away from bucket with even a small amount of liquid” – This is then repeated in Spanish of course.  We do not doubt the veracity of this warning, but only a foetus would be small enough to fall into this tiny box!

There is a saying around these parts that ‘he who dies with the most toys – wins.’  Well there is an English businessman called Joe Lewis (go on look him up on Google) who is giving this a good go. He owns Spurs football club I believe and his 220ft super yacht (recently refitted at a cost of £65 million) is due in Boston any day now. But this man is something else and the boatyard here is the most recent location for one of his more extravagant excesses. Mr Lewis it seems is a fan of the largely Spanish game of Padel Tennis and he likes to play this with his friends, wherever they might be. (A veritable who’s who of the great and the good).  So he takes his court with him wherever he is in the world. This game needs a special court with glass ends and steel mesh netting sides and to deal with the logistics of moving this court around he has three of them (!) each of which is packed away in its own huge container, so there is always one being used and two others either being set up or dismantled in different parts of the world.  It takes 4 men 7 days to set up each court once the container arrives on site but he rarely stays anywhere longer than a couple of weeks at which point the entire thing is dismantled and shipped to the next location. So with three of these constantly on the move, leapfrogging each other, the teams doing the setting up are pretty frazzled! The stats are fairly staggering and for example each court has 4 tons of glass shipped with it.  But the really stunning statistic is the news that he is having a new super yacht built and this will contain a Padel tennis court inside it! That means a space 10 metres by 30 metres and goodness knows what headroom!

We are feeling rather inadequate about our ‘amateur-hour’ efforts to send a single sail back to the UK…….

The weather has turned very hot and humid now and suddenly we find ourselves yearning for the cooler weather of last week, certainly we cannot wait to be free of the marina environment we are in and back out in anchorages in the breeze.

Lots of kind neighbours here though and we have enjoyed some great conversations where as usual we get quizzed to death and very well looked after. On Sunday morning the Green Bean Food Truck set up in the car park here and it becomes a local meeting point for the residents of ‘Easty’ (East Boston) and we sat and chatted to a number of them before returning to continue our chores, but not before sampling their breakfast offers. Sarah had strawberries and chocolate served between two waffles whilst I tried the bacon, avocado, cheese and egg in an English muffin. (Not like any muffin you will find in England though). The whole mismatch of terms used to describe certain foods leaves me baffled. A biscuit is a bap, an English Muffin is some sort of crumpet based bun, cookies are biscuits, chips are crisps (so fries are what we call chips of course) a scone is a muffin – oh please!

All Australian boats have now vanished off the planet, but I have to assume that they might start to miraculously reappearing if they come back from one down in the ashes. Hopeless trying to even begin to explain to our American friends what this Ashes thing is all about – especially since they steadfastly still believe that international competition is what happens between US states.

James Robinson arrived pretty much on time at the airport and his plane’s landing was greeted by a huge downpour! We had managed to avoid the rain ourselves as we had sneaked a lift on a car hire firm’s courtesy shuttle bus which took us right to the door of the correct terminal – even though we were the only passengers on board!