Sorry about no posts for a while. Dealing with repairs and kids takes up all my time. Just like home.
We left Georgetown after being ‘pinned down’ by strong winds for a while. Admittedly it was a lovely place to hang out, off the beach from the Volleyball Beach, with lots of kids to occupy ours.Auntie Andy came out to visit which was very good for all of us, although Middle One was badly behaved, he did settle quite a bit after her visit. She was just in time for Janines and Bens Birthdays. She went home with her bags about 20 KG lighter. Thank you Andy!

We stayed for a while. I think we were taken in by the local hype: the resident cruisers there are either timid or get too many weather reports. The VHF Net each day had a lot of discussion about the strong winds, and the local weather guru tended to over-estimate winds, so nobody dared leave. (its called Chicken Harbour by some, due to the fact the next 250 NM sail is the biggest jump in the Caribbean) We finally made the run, leaving with Sandy Feet, a Lagoon 45 cat, going south, and found the run to be quite benign, almost too little wind.

It took three days and two nights to get to the Turks and Caicos Islands, and our fears of losing a child to internecine warfare were unfounded. The nights were serene, and sailed most of the first night, with occasional lights of tankers in the distance. Lots of stars.

To get to the Turks and Caicos Islands we crossed the Tropic of Cancer, and now the climate is different. Hotter, and the water warmer. Still amazingly clear water, sparse coral, more fish. TCI is british, and looks affluent. The Fish Fry was more like Noosa Farmers Market than the equivalent in the Bahamas, and we got some great photos of an impending storm, our first big rain session.  we got pummelled. Rain in the southern Bahamas and TCIs is incredibly rare.

We all decided to get our hair cut here as it was the last ‘western’ outpost for a while. Janine found an authentic local barbers in “DownTown”, but in the time it took her to walk back down to our hire car and back, the the two youngest boys were given a lightning fast classic pudding bowl haircut, including the razor sharp helmet-shaped front fringe that will never comb out. Dumb and Dumber style. A haircut from Hell. Ben refused to leave the shop. I received a frantic phone call and had to move the car around to the back of the shops so that he could get out the back door without being seen. Max and I quickly decided not to have our haircut there. It was a very local barber and probably they had never cut any other hair-type but afro-caribbean. Or perhaps the boys had annoyed them. We’ll never know.  Their next haircut was in 2018.

We cleared out from Providenciales island of Caicos with the cast of Dumb and Dumber hiding in the cabins, but couldn’t leave due to serious chop on the 50 NM passage over the Caicos Banks, so we sneaked back ashore for icecream and a day on the beach.