I know you all want the chapter of the story at Grenada Marine to be over but the saga continues.......

Goodness knows we want this chapter over, we are living it! Unfortunately now instead of us living in the yard waiting for work to get done, we are living on the water, looking at the yard, waiting for work to get done.

We are still waiting on the rigger, "Louie" to finish his work. We had the traveller moved out of the cockpit and onto the coachroof. Louie was responsible for moving it and running the main sheet and aligning the new winch and clutch on the roof. He is also responsible for tuning the rigging, since his crew put the masts, etc. He says he is sorry and he feels bad, blah, blah, blah.....I am so sick of excuses. Turns out that the roof will need to be hollowed out where the new winch is being attached to fill in with extra hardening epoxy, so we now wait for the composite guy and we also wait for the metal guy to make the backing plate. Then Louie will be back to finish up.

Graham and I attached the new Missen sail the day before yesterday and unfortunately it seems it is too long. The length on the foot of the sail seems longer than the boom. We went and spoke to the sail maker and he said he measured from the old missen sail. Graham said well the reason we were getting a new sail is because the old one wouldn't furl in?? It is definitely NOT standard to measure the old sail to make the new sail, since the old sail could have stretched, etc. The sail maker is now on holidays as of yesterday, so his assistant said he would be out Monday to take a look. It will most likely mean, removing the sail and taking it back and recutting and sewing! arrggg

Ok, so our departure seems to be drifting in the distance but we ARE on the water :-)! We can jump in and cool off any time we want and there are some lovely naked old french people next to us, who seem to get in every few hours or so. Lots to see :-)! Nice cheeks for old folks. The bugs are WAY less too and our bathroom is CLEAN! So there are lots of positives and since we are still waiting, Graham and I are varnishing all the exterior woodwork and it is looking really good! The kids are going back and forth to the boat yard, to see their friend Adam and last night Amelia sang at the bar and Adam played guitar. They did "Hotel California". It was very cool.

So the Grenada Marine chapter of our lives continues for now.....

After 4 Months of waiting...Artemo left the spa and hit the water!

We launched "Lil'Artemo" our dinghy for the first time.

We watched with excitement as Artemo was lowered into the water.

We tried to wake Alex by enticing him with starfruit, after a "rolly polly" loud night on the water.

We attached the new main sail.

Graham and Amelia got up early and hiked up on the hill to get a picture of our ARTEMO!

4:06 pm and we still aren't in the water....

Here Graham and I sit in the cock pit, in the burning heat, waiting for the travel lift to take us to the water. They promised we would be the last boat in today and we are still hopeful.

We have raised the Canada flag and the Grenadian flag. We are excited. We accomplished so much today. Amelia and I raised Graham up the missen mast so he could attach our new antenna. It was cool doing this without anyone elses help. We are fully stocked with groceries, all the water tanks are full, the batteries are fully charged, the seacocks are closed, the fenders are out, the docking lines are ready, the mooring line is ready, the dinghy is inflated and ready and waiting in at the dock for us, the new sails are on board, the bottom is painted, the boat is polished.....we are ready....time for Grenada Marine to "Splash" us!

stay tuned......

Didn't mean to worry you all.....

After all the emails, I thought I better write a blog on a high note! It seems I grab the computer and write my blogs when I am stressed or worried and it seems to come through! Go figure? :-)

Yesterday we did a ton of boat work and accomplished many things and as far as we are concerned we are 100% ready for them to put us in the water BUT aside from boat chores here are the other great things we did that I usually neglect to mention!

• Made buns and bread and they turned out GREAT (everyone stop worrying....I am trying to fatten Graham up!)
• Made rice krispie squares with Alex and ate way to many mini marshmallows
• Amelia went 2 boats over to a boat named "island girl" with a lady named Barbara on it who misses her grandkids terribly and was wondering if Amelia liked art because she was willing to share her knowledge and paint with her!!!! Amelia spent 2 hours over at her boat doing watercolors and telling her what an amazing artist nanny she had!
• Alex skateboarded with his friend Adam
• Alex and Adam played RUNESCAPE....Adam also loves this game so he is the perfect friend as far as Alex is concerned!
• Amelia, Alex and Adam went to the bar and Adam played the quitar and Amelia sang a couple of songs she had written and they drew in a crowd!
• Amelia and Alex played with 3 kids from Quebec (Sebastian, Pascal and Amelie) and had so much fun trying to understand each other.
• Amelia, Alex and Adam walked up to the resort and swam in their pool for a few hours
• Graham made black bean burgers for my buns and rice pudding for desert
• We all went for a walk in the full moon light on the beach and the tide was out and we walked on the sand bars
• We all watched Gilmore girls

The Slice

Yesterday as the kids and I sat at the table homeschooling, the boat worker "The Slice" was working in the kitchen. He says to me, "Where is the Skip?". His pet name for Graham. I told him I wasn't sure and went back to math with Amelia. All of a sudden The Slice says, "Ok, well I am ready to drill." I look up again and say, "Ok". I haven't been involved with the work he has been assigned or what he had been doing. I gave the list to Nicholas and he assigns the work. I remembered that we did need an access hole inside for the attachment point for the traveller above deck. I was in no way qualified though, to get up and say well lets have a look. So The Slice takes the drill and decides on a spot and with a 2 inch circle drill head he proceeds to drill and then he says, "Done". Then he goes up on deck and he doesn't say to much me when he gets back.

Graham comes back (he was only gone for 10 minutes tops) and comes in takes a look and freaks out. He starts yellin at The Slice...."This isn't just a mistake, you are a whole FOOT out.....all you had to do was MEASURE.....F#$&*, F*&^$#, F*&*^!!!! Graham tells me, thats it, the final straw, go over to the office and tell them what has just happened and get his supervisor over here ASAP!

So off I go to the office and meanwhile The Slice is trying to fix his mistake on his own. Nicholas is off for the week, so Jimmy is filling his shoes. Raquel the office manager calls Jimmy and tells him that a hole has just been cut in our new roof and he better start supervising The Slice. Less than 2 minutes later Jimmy is on board and the two of them are trying to fix the problem.

The thing is, the roof we paid big money for will never be the brand new roof we wanted. Not only is there this hole but they have also screwed things to the deck and used screws that were to long and bingo we have screws coming through.

Right now "The Slice" is working on caulking the boat and he has brought another guy to help. He feels bad and apologized to Skip and is really trying hard to make everything right. He is a nice guy, just needs a bit more attention to detail. Junior is hooking back up the radar since they CUT the wire when they unhooked it for the roof???? Definitely not the standard but most likely the standard for here.

Tomorrow the riggers need to come on board and hook up the new travellor and reposition the lines and winches. Friday Splash isn't going to happen, so we are shooting for Monday now. You guys can uncross everything, if it happens it happens, I hesitate even naming a date at this point!

Graham got the engine running on the hard and did the oil thing and serviced it and everything looks good. He is definitely making it through his list. The kids and I trying to stay out of everyones way. We are homeschooling at the bar. The kids are happy, they have a friend here, Adam, who they say is perfect. He likes swimming, hide and go seek, runescape, DS and pretty much anything they suggest. Last night Alex caught his first fish on his new rod and Amelia ate it for dinner. Graham caught a tuna but it was about the size of his middle finger, so he got to live.

We will just keep on keeping on.....OH WAIT....I forgot to tell you the worst news of all.....last night in the middle of the night the FAN STOP WORKING.......It has been running 24/7 since we got here at the beginning of September. Lately though it has been showing signs of an impending death and last night it happened. Unfortunately, it happened right after a rain, so all the windows were closed and it was HOT and MUGGY. I lost it and started to cry and headed up on deck....luckily no was awake to see my melt down. I gathered myself up, opened all the windows, washed myself down and back to bed. Life without a fan commenced at 3:15am this morning.