We left Highbourne this morning with to very sad boys that wanted to stay and play with there new friends. Had to make it into Nassau in order to be ready to send Mom and Dad home and prepare to take Grammy and Grampy on their next Bahamas adventure.

Sam turned nine today and woke up to a bed full of balloons. He was a very happy boy.

Unfortunately about 40minutes out we heard a clunk and a big vibration from the engine. We shut her down and set the sails (5 knots of wind) and I went down to discover that the coupling issues had weakened the coupler on the transmission. It had sheared off. Sooo we had a very long sail ahead of us to Nassau.

We certainly made the best of the day and prepared for a birthday party enroute as we were likely to get in late in the evening at the stately 2.5knots we were doing.

Sam wanted a garbage truck on his cake so we improvised with Lego and the couple of colours we had to decorate. Heather made the cakes, Mom made the icing and Arleigh and I decorated. We were quite happy with it and so was Sam.

I found out via facebook that the spare Transmission that Andrew from Abby Singer was talking about happenned to be the exact same one as ours. Unfortunately we were heading away from it.

About 8 miles out the wind completely died. So I took the dingy for a run and tried towing for a bit. we were able to do about 2 knots but it was going to be a long night. Michael and Anne on Beans were passing by and graciously took us under tow and dropped us off at the anchorage in Nassau safely. Arleigh saddle towed us into the anchorage and we managed to anchor without incident. It helped that we arrived on slack current.

Dad and I were able to remove the transmission in a couple of hours the next morning and bring it to Alberts Marine. Hopefully they will have it back before the end of the week.

Due to these events Grammy and Grampy opted to postpone their trip instead of hanging around for repairs (I don't blame them one bit). We were all dissapointed not to see them but they will be down before we leave the Bahamas I'm sure. We will be on our own for a couple of weeks until my Brother comes down. We are really looking forward to that.