17:04.5N 61:53.8W

 

Unbelievable.  Our house sale has fallen through once again.  This time we even got beyond the point of exchanging contracts, but it still didn’t happen.  The agreement was that they would pay an initial 5% deposit,  2% at exchange and another 3% to follow two weeks later. This sounded reasonable to us until they failed to pay the second instalment.  Then we discovered how frustrating it is to be tied into a contract where you are just not sure of the intentions of the other party.  They kept saying the money was on its way, but it never materialised.  We could have simply walked away with the 2% after the first missed payment, but we didn’t want to completely give up on selling the house.  In the end we did cancel the contract, but not after having to move out of the house and then move back in again.  Now we have to sue for the 8% we are still owed.  Fat chance of seeing that.

 

So here we are, back on Anastasia again, departing from Antigua for Grenada.  Fortunately there have not been any tropical storms yet this season and it looks like the weather will be good for some island hopping south.  Off to Guadeloupe tomorrow morning.

 

Anastasia survived her three month layover pretty well.  The only problem we found on our return was that one of the fridge compressors was failing to start.  It would build up the pressure and then cut out after a few seconds.  This is the symptom of a partially blocked capillary, probably due to some corrosion building up in the tube.  Fortunately the problem cleared after manually restarting the compressor a few dozen times.

 

The other problem we had was “boom birds” which nested in our sail bag while we were away.   Our guardiennage person discovered them and blocked their point of entry, but you can see that there was a lot of mess to clean up.

 

Sunset from Jolly Harbour

 

Sailbag and boom defences in place

 

What happens if you don’t block all entry points