19th of January and we have been here for a month now. Seems like only yesterday we navigated the entrance to the harbour at low tide.

Slept much better last night, not perfect but at least I wasn't listening to the ships clock chime each hour. Tonight should be even better.

Today is pretty much a day of preparation for the small dinner party we have planned for tonight. There was one small setback in the initial stages in that the ground beef that I thought we had in the freezer apparently had already been used but fortunately we have some faux hamburg that had been gifted to us by Moonlight Maid before they went home for Christmas and New Years. That will have to do in its entirety unless I can find some sausages or something else when I head in to buy some OJ for the Painkillers to start things off tonight. Most places here have a minimum to be able to use the credit card and I am down on cash and the bank won't be open until tomorrow, Tuesday. I'm not sure why they don't have ATMs here. They have Internet. They have telephone connections. The only reason that I can think of is the requirement to regularly service the machines - put more dough in them, etc. Still, this is a happening sort of place and you'd think that it could be supported. On the other hand, do we really need the pace of life that we have at home? Having to wait for a week for the four hours of available banking does have a tendency to make you slow down and smell the coffee. Regardless, the one single controlling factor when shopping in the outer islands, setting aside the issue of price, is product availability. For example, there were no sausages so I got some frozen hamburg patties to make the meatballs out of, but they did have everything else that we were looking for. Huzzah!

I also made a trek to the other marina, the one that sells the gas, to buy some gas for the genset and outboards. I took the medium gas can for unmixed gas and the small gas tank for the mixed gas which had the 2 stroke oil in it already. I took our geezer cart to carry them back with and one thing about the trip back over the bumpy road - I didn't need to shake the 2 stroke gas up any more! The trip back in the cart was more than adequate.

After that I went over and gave Will a hand moving some sailing dinghies from where they had been worked on to the beach where they will be launched. These are antiques that had been built locally but some time ago and so needed some considerable work done to the hulls. Now that they are at the beach the cockpits will receive the same attention prior to launch.

In preparation for our wee soirée this evening Barb has been in the galley all morning baking bread and a pie so it will be freed up and ready for my humble efforts. I'll have everything done in time for our guests at 1800 so I will be posting this mid afternoon in order to free up my creative juices for the galley.