It's hurricane season and as you can probably tell by the lack of action on the blog, we are not moving much. We had a few weeks at home catching up with friends and family, not forgetting the Wokingham drinkers... I mean boaters group that we used to frequent...

On my return, we had some visitors - our great friends Robert, Pauline and Dahlia. We had a blast touring the island, swimming and introducing Dahlia to Scuba - she was a champ!

We've been anchored in Prickly Bay now for over a month. Keeping on top of hull cleaning isn't too bad - but the chain is now weeding up too!

So what of these pirates, you ask? Well on the day we flew home, the washing machine threw a wobbly leaving us with damp sheets. On my return, Robert helped me disassemble and debug. We decided on a new control module and display. These were duly ordered and Amanda arrived with them on her return. Alas, the new control module was not programmed despite being ordered with that condition. No Hoover agent out here, so no programming right? Wrong. We have onboard a BusPirate which we can use to "play" with hardware. So whilst my hardware guru friend Kevin was able to read off the code from a correctly programmed board in the UK, I was able to programme the same codes into my board here. Cracking! Except it didn't work. It seemed like it should but the buttons on the washer weren't working correctly. The big clue was the the self-test relies on you holding one button, but I had to use the adjacent one. This gave me the clue that it was a cable fault and indeed, we found that pin2 was not connecting properly. All sorted now, but it would have cost us some huge FedEx fees if we hadn't had our trusty BusPirate!

We are now pressing on with our remaining boat jobs. The new helm seat is fitted, and new cover ordered. At the same time we are redoing our cockpit cushions to make the a little softer and give them a new covering. Other boat jobs include servicing winches, adding a few more fans and installing 12v and USB charging points in our cabin. We have them in guest cabins, just not ours! Alistair has also visited again. He will qualify for frequent visitor points soon having been with us when we left the UK last May and visited us in Antigua in February. We got some diving in here too - this time including a Lion Fish hunt. This invasive species is getting everywhere, but it's quite tasty to eat even if you do have to be very careful of the poisonous spines. Once cut off, it's easy to fillet and BBQ the delicious white flesh. Here is one Alistair got. He managed 3 to my 1. It won't be long before we are back on the move again, so we will press on with the jobs ahead of the trip to Trinidad in early August.