20th July

Back to school this morning, which also means back to a 5am wake up call for me. Ouch on a winter morning!

Had a great weekend, on Saturday morning early we headed for Deneysville on a search for a marine store we had seen at the “Around the island race” in January. We had no idea what the name or the address of the store was so we turned it into a searching adventure. It took all of 3 minutes to find the unnamed shop after asking at the local hardware store. Some adventure!

We entered the shop “Star Marine” which held loads of little sailing treasures. Barry commented he could spend a month’s salary there and he was not kidding, everything an avid sailor could dream of and then some. We limited ourselves to only a few items including a wind direction instrument to be mounted on the top of the mast of our current boat, a few shackles and a pair of polarised sunglasses for me. Guess we will be climbing to the top of the mast soon or paying someone else to. Either way we need to learn what happens up there. It definitely sets us up for an interesting day or days….

We were discussing our December holiday and we have decided we will be taking our boat on a 2 week sail around the dam, we will anchor out and live permanently on the boat for the whole 2 weeks, this will give us great experience towards our goals. Rauen mentioned it would be great if we could do a night sail (meaning all night) and we think that was an awesome idea, we can take turns standing watch and see how it all works out! Very exciting stuff looking forward to December even more now!

Both kids got off to school with no hiccups, after checking stationery on Sunday morning early and heading to the store for a few items to replenish the pencil cases all was well. I spent the rest of the morning reading the end of “And the wind carried us” to Barry. He was rather sad it came to an end, but I consoled him with the prospect of reading Bumfuzzle next.




I called this morning to book for an SSB radio licence. We were not informed last time we could write both licences at the same time so we only wrote the VHF, now we have to write the SSB separate. We need this licence so we can receive e-mails and telephone calls on the boat. Once again we had to call Zondra at ICASA….once again she was not at work. Will have to try next week again. Hope this doesn’t follow the same route as last time!


PS Sorry it took so long to post but it has been a hectic week!