Yesterday marked the end of the club's opening regatta and it was fun to watch the brightly coloured sails bang around the buoys competing for the silverware. Several friends have come up to welcome us back and we invited Pat and Lisa from Noonan Knight over for dinner to catch up on news and to have a visit.

One momentous thing that we have finally come to grips with is that we are probably going to have to stay in Halifax until Barb gets her knees fixed and perhaps even until I get the last of the kidney stones kicked out of my carcass. This means at least this winter we will be on the hard. I will be looking for a job to supliment our income and to help pay rent on a place.

We have also decided that the trip from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia is getting a little old. I have done it eight times now and there is really nothing particularly interesting about it to make me want to do it again and again which is what we would be doing if we keep up with our current pattern of cruising. The marina in Deltaville is a good and reasonable place to leave a boat so we are thinking that if we were to put Nelleke up on the hard there from say May to August we could come home to avoid the really hot times down there and then go back with most of the distance covered to get us down to where we really want to cruise anyway - the Carolinas, Florida, the Bahamas and the other Caribean Islands and the Florida Keys. If we leave to go to the Bahamas or DR or some place like that we will satisfy the US Customs requirement of taking the boat out of the country for 15 days between cruising permits. It will also allow us to maintain our Nova Scotian residency status which is important for our medial coverage. Much of this will be dependant upon what we find out over the next month or so about Barb's knees. Definately don't want to give up the lifestyle but health is a reality that must be dealt with.