My friend Gavin in the local walking group owns Sailor's Gourmet foods and one key product is his lamb and rosemary sausages.  A breakfast favourite! Things are much quieter in the marina.  Long distance cruising still has not recovered from Covid and there are 32 empty berths on my pontoon alone. And another space comes free as a derelict catamaran is towed away.  It has come close to sinking several times.  But to make up for it my friend Mick arrives on a 100 foot schooner which has just had an 18 month refit.  Glad I did not pay for that.

I pop  over to Rebak Marina where master mechanic Robbie will supervise a 1,000 hour service on my engine.  His very able assistant, Andrew, comes from Holywood in Northern Ireland, just eight miles from where I grew up. There is some nasty bug growth on my Racor filter, a symptom of bio diesel so we empty all of the fuel out and I stuff Andrew into the tank to thoroughly clean it. Well, you didn't expect me to clean it, did you?

At this point the screen on the battery monitor starts to black out.  Fix one thing and another breaks.  That's boats for you. And my 90 day visa is about to expire so I am off on a visa run to Thailand and an opportunity to catch up on the multi million dollar refit of Cariad, the 110 foot ketch built in 1896. I was there last October and the work since then has been nothing short of staggering. It is now just five weeks away from launch.

Fingers crossed...