When the repairs that were commissioned over two weeks ago still weren’t done on Saturday, I asked our broker Tony if we should push out our flights. “No, come one down. All will be well”. Then it came differently.

It’s a long and complicated story which I won’t attempt to explain. Suffice to say the autopilot is still not fixed and the parts that were flown in from Europe are the wrong ones. We have one last hope for a used spare hydraulic cylinder that supposedly exists and might fit. If not, we are looking at hand steering all the way to Grenada and fixing it when she’s on land this summer. I am so glad Brad, the experienced delivery skipper arrived today. He is a really nice guy and we are already getting along well and together even the hand steering will be doable.

The other open item are the fridge and freezer. They are running now but David “Fridge Guy” was here today and says the system has a small leak and implored us to wait until Thursday so he can replace that part. Hmm, not sure. But he was quite insistent and said with a heavy French accent “Mon dieux it is against my ‘onor to let you leave like that” and quoted a fair price.

So maybe we’ll wait the extra day. I’ll sleep on it. The winds are light and have a bit too much south in them anyway and conditions will get better the longer we wait.

How do we know? Weather routing. With Brad’s help we used some of the fancy new software to let the computer figure out our best course and time of departure to give us the fastest and smoothest voyage. As you can see there are different options, some fully offshore and some hugging the islands. We’ll rerun the model the next couple of days until we actually leave. Currently, Fri morning looks most likely. Stay tuned.

In the meantime there is plenty to do, discover, and test and I am enjoying my new “office” the nav station. We’ve also started to get a few random visitors, experienced cruisers who stop to marvel at JACE, ask if they might come aboard for a look, and are full of praise for her, not seldom with a pang of envy in their voices. Now that feels good!

So hanging here has been good and the spot where we are docked has the added benefit of a very good restaurant and bar right next door and even live music, today playing a bunch of U2.

So life is good and I am no longer as overwhelmed as I was yesterday.