LinoCat

There was a fancy dress party on pigeon island. Since we all had our indian clothes with us we represented India there. Even Lani had her indian dress on and she was photographed quite often. She fell asleep around 20.30 and we parked the pram a little away from the biggest noise where she was sleeping without waking up until close to midnight when we left. Andi ended up in the H2O par, then in the pool and then on the ESPUMERU, a finnish boat until the sun came up. He looks quite ok for that :-) We had Limbo- and firedancers, a Reggaeband and a good DJ and i guess around 95% of people were dancing, no matter which nationality or age. It was fun! For food there have been skewers with chicken, Pasta and good Pita bread and for drinks beer in flavour of Heineken and Piton, the local brand. Piton beer tastes very good! And of course they had rum punsch.

Life is hard here ! We are sweating our butt off in 33 degrees Celcius. Then we are going from one partynight to the other. Even Lani is shouting "Party Party" in the evening. She loves to wander around between people´s legs and yesterday at around 20:30 she then came to me and said "Bett" and we put here on the boat where she was sleeping within 10 minutes. PERFECT! The "flag man" is bringing fruit to the boats and the sparkling laundry with their pirate hats is doing the laundry. Getting here away from the beach or from water in general is hell. Lani crying and fighting like crazy. Our windvane is still not working but it looks like it is the cable so most likely this week a new cable has to be put in the mast. What a "/§%&/%" job! I hope to do a scuba dive tomorrow. In St Lucia you have to dive with a local guide and the dude who is servicing the outboard engines here is also the local PADI guy and so we might join him. Now we have to hur...

Lani wanted to check out the beach today while the big boys wanted to play with the new outboard engine and so we did a short ride into the bay and to the beach. The engine runs like a charm and the speed is fun. The beach was almost empty and Lani had fun collecting stones and shells. When we had to leave she was crying her eyes out but we promised her to come back soon!

Due to lack of performance we had to fire our good old 5HP 2 stroke Yamaha. The negine was still running nice but in the future we will have longer passages to the boat or beach ot supermarket and we got a brand new Yamaha E15 15HP Enduro 2 stroke engine. The price was much cheaper than in Europe and this was also the reason we waited until the Caribbean. The old one got a nice last ride out to the anchorage and then we left it at the dealer and he will sell it for us. We still hope he is finding a good new home!

Every Friday night there is a street party in Gros Islet, around 10 minutes away from Rodney Bay marina. Taxi costs around 20 EC-Dollar thats around 5 EUR. There are many locals opening bars, selling food playing music, dancing and so on. The atmosphere is extremely relaxed, open and friendly and not pushy at all. We had rum punsch, beer and grilled prawns and chicken with rice and a creole sauce on top of it. Very nice. Andy came back to boat around 3 or 4 :-) but we were back earlier because Lani still needs to adapt to time change and so we knew that she would wake up around 6.30. (It was actually 6.45 when she woke up). Peter chatting with a bar dude. There are very small poor looking huts but also neat nice and clean houses.

Hi, many have asked us about the "How?" of using a kite while sailing to get some pictures of your boat. First, you need the willingness to loose all the money you invest in it. The chances are there that the wind dies down once your equipment is 100m up in the air it will just be ditched in the water. Not willing to accept that? Then don´t do it! Otherwise you need a kite next. I use a Sutton flowform single line kite for that. You also need a bracket to fix the camera to. This usually has a pivacet system installed. This contains 4 smal pulleys and a piece of rope and is a masterpiece of efficiency. It makes sure that the angle of the camera is kept independent of the angle the line has. As a digital camera take a cheap one with wide angle lens and important: An integrated intervall timer! This you can set to 5 seconds and then the camera will click a snap every 5 seconds. With a 8GB SD card this gives you plenty of pictures and maybe 1% is good :-) I use a Ricoh Caplio 6 ...

To Helmut and Sylvia from the catamaran Onotoa. Check their blog at: http://onotoa.blogspot.com They were our "land crew" for the trip and we were emailing on a daily basis. They were the ones updating our blog and i am really happy about that. Looking forward to meet them in person!