It is hard to describe how wonderful it feels to be hugged by the heat, stroked by the sunshine with just a light riffle of wind to create the perfect environment for two old souls working through the last days of a course of bronchitis busting penicillin.  Blissful or what?

We enjoyed the usual uneventful sort of arrival in St Lucia, greeted by the efficient taxi driver at the airport, sharing a taxi with Alan and Julie, narrowly avoiding having the taxi impounded by zealous policeman on his discovery that the vehicle was neither taxed or insured at a random roadside check.  The smartly uniformed zealot (how do they get their whites so white?) kindly allowed the taxi driver to deliver us to Rodney Bay where we escaped with our lives. 

After some avid nesting on Wind Charger, we cracked open the first gin and tonic of the season, typical Elizabeth specials, with Alan and Julie and had a very enjoyable evening swapping salty tales which we do seem to be getting much better at after a few years of being genuine yachties.  We fell into bed and slept like sozzled logs.

Today has been about provisioning (other people just go shopping at the supermarket whereas yachties have to invent clever words unintelligible to ordinary mortals) filling up with fuel, getting the computers to work (a nightmare with the patchy wifi particularly as the Live Mail insisted on downloading each and every message from Bob’s email account since June) and keeping our fingers crossed that the new, very essential spare part for Gerry would arrive from Antigua.  It did, eventually.  Chris the electrician is to drop by and fit it in the morning.  This means that our carefully plotted and planned schedule will now be one day out.  Will we make it to Anguilla for Christmas Day and our restaurant booking? 

I also managed to fit in a run in with the arrogant jerks from the ARC reception team who informed us that we had to move because there was arrival due this evening who was allocated to our particular berth, not one of the 50 odd empty ones around us.  I was not best impressed and extracted an apology for his rudeness but it wasn’t at all genuine which made it exceedingly irritating. I went and fretted about it with Bob.  We regaled Ulrich about it and his take on the situation was very clear and delivered with even better arrogance of the best Austrian kind: “Tell them to bugger off”.  We will.

To cheer ourselves up from such unpleasantness we assembled our black pretend Christmas tree which is covered in LEDs that change colour from pink and purple, red and green and all sorts in between.  It is gloriously naff and we love it!