Oh Canada!

Radio silence. I know I have been TERRIBLE at blogging. My apologies! I have no excuse other than the fact that some days it's above 40 degrees celsius with humidity and the thought of a hot laptop anywhere near me makes me nauseous. It's also hard to even the tiniest bit productive when you are sweating so much your eyes are burning and render you effectively blind.

So what have Nomads been up since the last blog? Well we visited a bunch of Caribbean islands, had a very special visitor come and stay with us on the boat and we went home to Canada for a visit! We are currently in Grenada, fixing up the boat and waiting out hurricane season. It's very rough, choppy and rolly in our anchorage today so we have come ashore and have free wifi and some AC power to charge our laptops. This means you're all in for a treat - I have all afternoon to blog away and catch you up on our adventures.  Since I got so much flack for the lack of blogs when I went home I assume that means people are still reading this!

We arrived in Grenada at the end of July and had arranged to leave our boat at the Grenada Yacht Club so that we could go back to Canada for a break and catch up with some family and friends. The timing could not have been better. As you all know we encountered our fair share of break downs and that left us feeling like we were racing the "hurricane season" clock. In hindsight we set a pretty crazy pace to get down here and we were exhausted.  By the time we left the left Grenada we had no running water and one barely functioning toilet. It was hot as hell and we never had enough power for a fan. Before we could check into the yacht club we were staying in a very rolly anchorage. After being thrown around the boat for a few days we were all a little fed up to say the least. By night three I was laying in bed listening to a bottle of sesame oil and a glass clink and roll around. No matter how I repositioned them, wrapped them, moved them, I just could not get them to be quiet. I flew out of bed into the galley grabbed the glass and bottle of sesame oil and stormed upstairs and threw it overboard! These were the glasses I spent the better part of a year trying to keep safe. It was definitely time for a break!

After a ridiculously long journey that ended up spanning 2 days full of delays and reroutings we made it back to Halifax on Aug 8.

The delays meant that James got to eat at his favourite Cuban restaurant in Miami - Versailles. My brother picked us up at the airport and it was so awesome to see him! James spent a month in Halifax and I ended up spending about seven weeks. It was a crazy busy visit that flew by but we got to see lots of people we have been missing.

James headed back to the boat before me and started working on projects we felt would improve our quality of life on the boat. First on the list was improving the fridge. This thing is a serious energy hog and was the main reason we never had an amp to spare. James reinsulated the fridge and also filled up our freon since we only had one functioning cold plate last year, it just could not keep the fridge cold. Our fridge now runs less than 6 hours a day instead of a whopping 20hours a day!! We switched all the lightbulbs to LED. So now we have enough power to turn a light on and it isn't giving off tons of heat when we do! We lived in headlights last year since we never had enough power for lights - the semi-permanent indentation on my forehead from the headlamp is finally starting to fade.

I spent a few more weeks at home helping my brother with some landscaping projects and my mum with some home renos. We got to go shopping and out for lunches and coffees. It was lovely. We also got to catch up on snuggles with our little fat snuggle bug Kina and I celebrated by birthday at home with lots of cake! As the leaves started changing colour and as weather got cooler and we started lighting fires and I started wearing wool toques I realized it was time to book a flight back to Grenada - I'm no longer built for the slightest bit of cold!

Kina

All in a day's work driving a skid steer ;)

Birthday Cake

I've been back on the boat for almost three weeks and we left the yacht club and anchored outside the capital of St.George's. It's a beautiful small city full of colonial architecture and centred around the Carenage - the local harbour. It's full of art galleries and chocolate shops - I'm in heaven. After spending a few days visiting the town and the beach we headed south a few miles to Prickly Bay to meet up with our friend Dan on Vagabond. We've been here ever since just chipping away at jobs and dealing with customer service reps in the States for all the products we need that are either on back order or we bought and discovered they were faulty. Weren't we supposed to be leaving all this behind?!?

We have lots of little jobs to do but most important is trying to get a new autopilot. We have been trying to get one since March and since May it has been on backorder. Every week the date gets pushed back. Since we have a departure date of about November 1 from Grenada we need this motor!! If anyone knows how to get us a SIMRAD RPU 160 please let us know!