Great news we are back on board and very happy to be here. We were so lucky to be able to stay at Alison and Fabian's house, but we were getting seriously comfy, too comfy almost, so glad to be back into our adventure. Tim's operation went well and we got back here a couple of days ago. All great with the boat, and I managed to purloin a sort of "mounting block" of steps so that Tim can get on board fairly easily. Will upload a picture. He has to be careful not to put stress on his abdominal area for a few weeks, so hauling himself up onto the pulpit would not have been good. We had a meeting with the ARC team today, and we will set off for the Cape Verde's at 13.00 hours a month today. Lots of exciting seminars in the couple of weeks before we go including one on two handed sailing and another on provisioning which will be good. We now have a list of about 50 jobs scheduled over the next four weeks to take into account Tim's level of fitness. These are all smallish jobs and range from tiny things like putting lanyards on the flags for Cape Verde and Grenada to slightly bigger things like fitting the outlet pipe to the electric bilge pump we rigged earlier. Heavier jobs will be delayed to week 4, this week we are only doing light things. I got a third gas bottle hooked up today because we want to keep the two "boat bottles" which are 4.5kg each full, so that we have plenty gas when we leave. It is hot here, so we purchased a wind scoop that will push fresh air through the boat a bit, and especially make the forepeak cooler at night. We discovered that we had a bolt missing at the bottom of the Profurl furling system. That could have been serious but it is now replaced. All good stuff. We hoisted our ARC flag and there are quite a few ARC boats already here, so it is getting exciting. Looking forward to the next stage of our adventure [famous last words]. Thanks for all your texts and messages asking after Tim, it was nice to be able to tell him you were asking after him.