At noon today we are exactly 100 nautical miles from Marigot Bay in St Lucia, where we are going to make a quick stop to take on fuel and fresh water at the Moorings base. We will also have to obtain two oil filters for our Yanmar engines and give the engines a service as we are just hitting the service period.

One thing we collect at sea is garbage. All vegetable scraps are thrown overboard but all plastic and containers are bagged and stowed in one of our lockers for disposal in the correct manner. This is another item that we will be leaving in St Lucia together with as many 25 litre plastic drums that we used for diesel storage. They are all empty and we need to get rid of them to create storage space for gear we have to load in St Maarten.

Our ETA in St Maarten is now Monday morning, the 24th December and our ETA in Tortola is about noon on the 25th December. A bit of a shame as I had wanted to arrive the day before Christmas so that we could book a table at some restaurant for a Christmas lunch.

We have received our flight details back to Cape Town and depart Tortola on December 27 and arrive back in Cape Town just before noon on December 29. The flight is from Beef Island (next to Tortola) to San Juan to Charlotte in the US to Frankfurt to Cape Town. More on that in a future report.

This is another short report. The next one, after we depart St Lucia, will give you a bit more information on what is happening and how we are getting along to our destination.

Regards from Shaun, Terry, Shaheda and myself, John.