Yacht Larus

Good grief, it has been far too long since we last updated. A few days ago I saw that the date was the 30th, but I had no idea of which month. August apparently! The last two months really have been a whirlwind.

It will be a little longer before we can do our usual photo heavy blog, but in the meanwhile, this is what we've been up too. We'll post 'properly' again once we have good wifi and plenty of time.

Way back in July we sailed down to Trinidad to do our STCW95, Basic Marine Safety. It was a very intensive week of First Aid, Fire Fighting and Sea Survival. We took the course with a people from all over the Caribbean - fishermen, yacht skippers and shop workers - and that made it a lot of fun and very interesting.

We put Larus into a Coral Cove Marina, Chaguaramas, for a month - for the course and so both of us could go to our respective home countries to visit family, me up to Canada and Tim over to the UK. We both had marvellous visits and the fares from Trinidad and Tobago are quite reasonable so we hope to be doing that again.

Once back in Trinidad we high-tailed it up to St Vincent in the Grenadines to catch a lift on a catamaran heading up to St Martin for our shore based training with the charter company we will be working for. The training stretched out to include a training charter with another crew and their guests, after which we worked our very own charter. Moto Iti was the cat we trained on (in the photo above) and then worked on. We had a great time with really wonderful guests, none of whom had sailed before, but who grabbed the experience with both hands and ran with it.

A few days after the charter finished we were on a LIAT (Luggage In Another Terminal) flight back to St Vincent and Larus.

Yesterday, the 4th of September, we upped anchor and limped over to Bequia, due to a tonne of growth on the hull, where we started to remove the tonne of growth before heading south.

We were very pleased with how well Larus, went back together - jib back up, safety gear back out, larder reprovisioned. We were a bit disappointed that the niggling problems with both the wind generator and the diesel generator have not magically repaired themselves in our absence. I've just edited the previous paragraph from ' heading south to Grenada' to simply 'heading south', as we're probably going to end up in Chaguaramas, Trinidad, via Grenada, to get the diesel generator serviced by a Panda dealer.

So, today we will finish scraping the weed, crabs, barnacles, coral and tiny shrimps off the bottom of Larus, we're heading south again. :D

ps. We've finished the hull and I feel quire bad about all the aquatic flora and fauna we've made homeless, particularly the tiny red crabs around the waterline, but I'll get over it.