Fantastic news ... Oceans Dream will be 'splashing' on Wednesday of this week - just 11 months after her original launch and 9 months after our arrival in Trinidad. We are soooo looking forward to getting back in the water, Wednesday just can't come soon enough! The local friends we've made are surprised to hear that we're soon to be vacating our slot in the yard, many were certain we were going to stay for good!

We've spent the last week servicing the engines, cleaning off 9 months worth of Trini dust, painting her bottom, polishing the hulls for what will hopefully be a much longer stint in the water than last time. Our plans are to spend some time in the local waters checking out all the systems and sails before heading North to Grenada for a long-awaited change of scenery and to catch up with fellow cruisers who have headed off prior to us. We then plan to make our way slowly westwards through the outlying Venezuelan Islands, the Dutch Antilles, and then onto Cartegena in Columbia for Christmas (but we've already learnt not to set anything in stone ... we'll see how things go).

We hired a on Friday car for a trip to the wholesalers to provision for the coming weeks (loo rolls, toothpaste, tea-bags, soap, the list goes on...) as it's easier to load up on land than have to carry shopping out to the boat in the dinghy. The hiring of the car was eventful enough in itself. After travelling for about 35 minutes, the thing cut out on us - we were stranded ... no tools, just three emergency numbers to call in the event should 'anything' happen. Fantastic, no need to worry, we'd be outta here soonish. The calls were made to all three numbers, and all three ansaphones responded in the same way "Exclusive Cars - please leave a message". Hmmmm, our original optimism was pretty much quashed there and then! Try again in another half an hour. This time, we had luck and a mechanic was sent out to sort the car arriving an hour later. "Sticky starter" we were told, all well and good but how was he going to fix it? We needed a car to get us to the shops to load full to the brim. After lots of "umming" and "erring", it just so happened the Boss of Exclusive Cars was passing by on the highway, pulled up on the hard shoulder and told the mechanic to give us his car so as not to hold us up any further. Very sensible, and so off we went on our shopping expedition. Soon we discovered the lack of air-con (a MUST here in Trini, comes as standard usually!) and, following our trip to the wholesalers with the car fully laden "oh no, the boot's jammed, all those perishables...". We have come to the conclusion that any decent scrapyard in the UK would reject the car on the basis of it being worthless! Here endith our lesson on hiring a car in Trini!

That's it for now, the next blog will include an instalment on Oceans Dreams warranty work ... and the 50 or so defects listed on the Surveyors report.
With very best wishes from a Very Happy Crew.