18th October to 2nd November 2019
A beautiful sail up from Tobago Cays, plenty of wind on the beam and averaging 6-7 knots with no effort at all, and little swell, was very pleasant indeed. We anchored swimming-distance from Princess Margaret Beach. ‘Bread Man’ came next morning – banana bread, croissants, and a baguette were all very welcome. We do like bread man (he motors around the anchorage shouting “bread man”, around 7-7:30 every morning). Luxurious. As was the lack of mosquitos.
We like it here. We can all swim to the beach – Hector in his swimming ring, Theo with his noodle, and Arthur with one brief rest on a horse (me) halfway through the 100m swim. To be honest, I don’t think he needs the rest anymore. Because of the bay’s shape and the gentle weather in general at the moment, Theo also enjoyed swimming a lot while we were here. Nice to see him back into swimming, he’s lost his confidence a little recently.
The bigger boys are alternating between fighting and playing the most wonderful imaginative games. A little stressful when they fight as Theo doesn’t hold back (that’s a marked understatement) and is big/strong enough to hurt Arthur now. Arthur manages to rein himself in, at least enough to keep it vaguely safe, but has a habit of winding Theo up endlessly which is… not sensible. We’ve deployed a red card technique to appeal to Theo’s love of rugby and hatred of losing (red card = loser) and that’s helping us to slowly regain some semblance of control when it gets out of hand. On the other hand, their imaginative games can last for hours now. It’s awesome. Even if it does sometimes mean bedtime is delayed, after dinner starts with a 10-minute monologue from Arthur about their latest invented machine. And there’s more imaginative games than fights, so 😊.
Shops in town are good, and there’s a fedex agent right next to the dinghy dock so we had our engine parts (the radiator cap, and some general spares) shipped over while we were here. And filled up a gas tank. And caught up on a few boat jobs – our hatches no longer leak which is a cause for celebration every time it rains. I won’t tell you how long one of them has been leaking for, because it’s embarrassing.
Celebrated Theo’s 4th birthday- our oven stopped working, so we had to finish his cake on the BBQ! Spent some time playing on the beach and generally allowing Theo to set the pace on his special day.
I have had quite a bit of work on recently but have hired a few people to take some of the workload, so hopefully I’ll be back down to 15-20 hours a week at some point soon.
