1 Feb 2011

[Captains Blog] Tied to the jetty in St David's Harbour

Talk about going from one end of the spectrum to the other - having had our exciting and scary trip down to St Davids, we are now well and truly in the doldrums, waiting around for the repairs to be done. After the initial flurry of activity on Saturday, here we are on Tuesday still waiting for the work on everything else to start. We have fallen foul of the Grenada Sailing weekend which carries on beyond Sunday and all the Grenada Marine staff who can make decisions have decided, yes you guessed it, to go sailing.

Whether we will be able to cajole, bribe or generally persuade people to work on our issues in preference to others in (pardon the pun) the same boat as us will be the test. In the meantime, I have unpacked and repacked everything from the lazarette ready for the workers to do their thing every day for the past four days. What I don't know about its contents isn't worth knowing. I have repaired crates that collapse as soon as you look at them so that they can now be lifted in and out with relative impunity; I have re-attached all the stanchions, safety rails, brackets and fittings that I can, and I am still bored out of my tree.

The main problem we face is that we cannot realistically leave the boat, even for a short while to go for a walk to relieve the tedium as sod's law dictates that the one person we need to speak to turns up at the boat, finds we are not there, and then they disappear off the face of the earth for another half day, not answering their phones and with full message mailboxes so that we can't even ask them to try again. So here we sit, reading, updating our blog, writing more of the book and trying to pass the time as best we can. We set a deadline for the work to be done by end of play today, but I won't hold my breath.