Last night, feeling tense from the prevarication and recalcitrance over the auto helm, and checking for an e-mail from them every 5 minutes (nothing of course), we ventured all of 20 yards from the dinghy dock and fell into the nearest place serving food, The Pub.  It transpired that it was curry night, a more British experience we could not imagine.  We ordered from the lovely friendly local waitress, who sported a fabulous bottom the size of two large watermelons, were served promptly and eagerly mopped up the tasty sauces from our plates with the naan bread. Tasty, and it took our minds off the prevailing uncertainty on what on earth were we to do?

This morning we stalked around like agitated expectant parents desperate to phone Cay Electronics to find out what was going on but knowing that this was unlikely to help the situation, merely entrench the curmudgeonly old codgers further.  We held on until 12:30pm before we made the call.  “Might get around to it today, might not.  Might be next week now. You aren’t in any hurry are you?  Call again at 5pm, we will give you an update.”  Aaaaargh!  Our tension levels reaching screaming at each other pitch, in the absence of anyone else to scream at, we decided to go on to Plan B and concocted a plan to recruit 2 crew to share the hand steering back to St Lucia.  We made up a nice hand written notice with tear off phone numbers and set off for the Yacht Club, the most likely place to start when looking for crew in an unknown location.  At the Yacht Club we firstly spoke to the cleaner who didn’t speak any English at all and waved us over to a casual looking chap having a fag on the veranda who turned out to be the chef/manager not the sailing bum that we first surmised from his appearance.  He turned out to be extremely helpful, as well as American, and very kindly got our advert up on the BVI Crew Group site saying that in this day and age no one used paper adverts, it was all done on FB.  Within ten minutes of posting our ad, the phone rang and a heavily accented South African woman explained that she had a lad staying who was desperate for adventure and she could send him round.  She declared him a nice lad but that “he talked a lot”.   We had another beer while we waited for him to trot round from Wickham’s Cay, right the other end of town.  Meanwhile the restaurant owner, a tall American of about 50 plus came in and on discovering our plight jumped at the chance to join us as crew but needed to get his business sorted, and the approval of his fiancee.  The lad, Matthew turned up, a buzzy, talkative 21 year old and we “interviewed” him simultaneously with the older American.  They would be completely incompatible as a pair but at least we had our fall back position so ya boo sucks (we were in that childish sort of mood) to Cay Electronics.  After our afternoon turned into some serious human resources machinations we returned to patient Windy for a cogitate. 

At 5pm on the dot Bob rang the auto helm “mender” and was gobsmacked to be told that “it was mended”.  No further explanation, just that, we can pick up the patched up casualties on Monday.  Well now what?  We have become very cynical over time about “things that have been mended by people who don’t give a damn”.  What would happen if just the two of us set off for Nevis on the 24 hour sail and the thing broke down again?  We are tempted to take along a crew man for insurance.  We will cogitate further this evening over a beer, or maybe we need to have an even more serious cogitate and turn to the gin.