When things go wrong, they normally go in threes… We’ve had at least two threes!

Sister Kate was to arrive Monday evening – but she’d had a bit of an adventure on her trek from the UK, including having to have all passengers get off one flight because they had one too many bags aboard – this delayed them somewhat, but she recovered and made it as far as Martinique – where the pilot had a heart attack! Flight cancelled. She’d come as far as she could that night – so they put her up in a hotel. Meanwhile, Laurie and I made our way to the airport to meet her – not. We waited for the last flight in but nothing.

We came back in the morning for the first flight of the day and fortunately she was aboard.

When we got back to the harbor, it was pouring rain – harder than we’d experienced to date – so we went and had a beer and a bite to eat. When we got back to the dinghy, which was beached on the sand, Kate managed to stumble and fell on a piece of glass buried in the sand and was awarded with a massive gash in her shin. We did some quick triage, but it was clear she needed stitches, so Jason, one of the PAYS guys (the organization that keeps all the yachties secure) took us to the emergency room where she was promptly seen to with 15 stitches!

When we got back, the wind had turned to the west – highly unusual – creating a large on-shore surf. There was no way we could get Kate onto the dinghy and then off again, so Jason very kindly offered to put Kate up for the night in his house.

Meanwhile, with the help of 3 big guys, I was able to launch the dinghy and rode back to Toodle-oo! and recovered some of Kate’s clothes. I headed back to the dock, but the swell was so high I managed to get thrown out of the dinghy (with Kate’s bag!) and was lucky that the dinghy didn’t come down on top of me. Unfortunately, I was carrying our only phone – which appears to have suffered terminally, though Laurie is currently trying to revive the bloody thing. In the beaching accident, I also managed to bugger up the engine!

With Kate packed away with Jason, I considered options for getting back to Toodle-oo! Fortunately, new OCC members (had only applied that morning!) Mark and Lynn  on Roxy were also ashore, and we all went to a local beach bar to wait out the worst of the surge. Finally at 9:00pm, things had died down a little and we managed to launch their dinghy and they brought me back to Toodle-oo!

Kate – Finally enjoying a beer!

In the morning I recovered Toodle-Pip! and found that the damage to the engine was annoying but minimal – we can get if fixed in Martinique.

Kate has since managed to get aboard Toodle-oo! – though she probably regrets it to a degree due to the adverse conditions – we have been rocking and rolling in the anchorage for the past 3 nights with a northern swell creating havoc along with the westerly winds… Hopefully it’ll settle tonight…